It was sunday morning. I expected to find several cafe’s open, but the city was resting, or sleeping. Finally I found one. Dark inside, few clients reading the newspaper. I ordered a cafe, and started, slowly, to relax. My son was few months old and I have agreed with the mother that I will get the sunday’s free, after being the dad at home for the others days of the week. This was the first of such sundays.
Twenty years have passed. Right now, well over midnight, I have welcome home that same son of mine, done with his late working shift. He went straight to the room he has always had here. In the room besides, ours, his mother sleeps already. A lot of time has passed, and I don’t really remember how come that that sunday I was so exhausted. But I remember the muscles of my whole body, and my brain, slowly relaxing. I don’t think neither my wife or me knew what was about to hit us when we got pregnant. I know we didn’t. I know we hadn’t the slightest clue. And yet here we are, still together, happy, with a son we love.
A week later I walked in the same cafe, and took a chair. About three minutes later, the waiter came with the same cafe I ordered a week before, smiled a “good day sir”, put it in front of me, and walked away. I was definitively astonished, and wordless. Then I begun to believe that Utrecht could replace Caracas, or at least accompany her. In my mind, perhaps even in my heart, never mind how corny that reads. Many years have passed hence, and I still go to Le Journal, as the cafe is called, and have a little conversation with the waiters, drink a coffee, read a newspaper, and if I may, I write.
We were waiting for a stop light to turn green, on our bicycles going home from his school, when A. asked me: “Pap, do you believe in god”? He was about 7, or 8. I sputtered. I am a self styled buddhist, and for the rest, skeptic of pretty much everything; but I also firmly believe that religion is a force of good for a mayority of believers. I did not had the time to figure out how to even start to convey this to my son. I guess I answer any platitude, and he look me sideways, and probably decided, not by first time, and surely not for last, that I wasn’t that interesting after all. “I believe it is all fairy tales” he said. And the light turned to green.
One of these days I should pay him a coffe, in Le Journal, and ask him what is he thinking about all this. Who knows, maybe it is the beginning of something else, again.