Week 29: That old feeling

Classes were finished early last Monday, and realizing I had nothing else to do—or that I was too lazy to do anything useful—I ate and had tea at the nearby Midtown Diner, an old restaurant along Padre Faura Street. The interiors date back to the seventies. The waitresses, gracious and talkative, aren't too young anymore. It's a place where old people hang out, mostly lawyers visiting the Supreme Court.

The food is nothing spectacular. But part of the fun is the chatter that happens after 5 pm, when the offices have just closed and people start coming in. Sometimes I overhear conversations, a few of them I find rather amusing—a lawyer bragging about his curriculum vitae, a woman with problematic children. I'm usually alone, and that affords me the chance to be quiet, to look outside the window, and to marvel at God's mercies to me daily.

That day I also headed to the Solidaridad bookstore of novelist F. Sionil Jose where I killed time, browsing through rare book collections for sale. It was around 6 pm when I got out, the sun was still shining, and without a care in the world, I walked back home.