Notes from a week

Au Café, Edouard Manet, 1874

I had no shortage of imag­ined disasters — some sketched out professionally, others just recreational — but in all of them, while the bombs fell or the seas rose, a jaunty couple sat together in a café sip­ping their espressos. Defiant.

I never imag­ined a world without cafés.

How can you have a world without cafés?

It is likely that half the bars, cafés, and restau­rants in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area will go out of busi­ness in the next month.

Many of these busi­nesses had no buffer whatsoever. “Eighteen hours of cash on hand,” a friend joked about a large restau­rant in Berkeley.

Some of these busi­nesses were very profitable — not all, or even most, but some — and I’ll con­fess I find myself won­dering where all the money went.

Have faith in matter. Backstage, behind the scrim of public life, the real economy is untouched.

Fac­to­ries and fields might tem­porarily be more dif­fi­cult to reach, but they are whole and untouched. They were full to bursting before this began, and they are full to bursting now.

Kathryn and I are ordering take-out from our all-time favorite restau­rants. Two days ago, this felt like a ges­ture of solidarity; today, it feels like … I don’t know — like slip­ping a little money into a child’s pocket as they board a train that will take them far away.

A few years ago, our favorite café closed. Its owners were tired of run­ning it, ready for some­thing new. They threw a party and the whole neigh­bor­hood came. Every­body got to thank them.

This crisis has over­matched the social media style of most busi­nesses, big and small. The stan­dard hard-eyed cheer doesn’t work anymore.

Some take shelter in a stiff upper lip. “We’ll get through this!”

I’m proud of the busi­ness owners brave enough to share their shock and sad­ness forthrightly, even weep on camera. Who have said: this is terrifying, existential. Who have said: we were just get­ting started.

It’s likely you’ve sent a mes­sage to a neighbor and/or friend in the past week con­taining some ver­sion of the sen­ti­ment “let me know if there’s any­thing I can do to help.” That is really great!

However, there is a more effec­tive way to estab­lish that channel, a more potent ges­ture, and that is to ask for help. Counterintuitive, I know!

It can be some­thing small. Make it up. “Do you have any arugula?”

Line in Front of the Butcher Shop, Edouard Manet

March 2020, Oak­land