Crumpet
by Dale—Age 48—Bowling Green, KY
It was 1983, I was twenty-four, betwixt and between, and damp summer Sunday mornings found me sliding from my Haight Street futon before the diesel buses finished their night shifts. By 5 a.m. I’m hand-mixing twenty-four pounds of flour with water, salt, baking soda, phospholac, and yeast, greasing rings like so many hula hoops, scooping batter onto the sizzling griddle, gingerly sliding a spatula under a crumpet.
I opened at 7:30.
A tea shop of finger sandwich gentility The Crumpet Shop was not. No pastel tea doilies, espresso machines, ferns. Only an occasional Anglophile (notably one Sir Twining from across the pond!) fussed about drinking tea in Styrofoam cups. Regulars left signature mugs, which we hung on a rack hipper watering holes reserved for scarf and beret.
I loved such lazy, inclement Sundays, the old rattletrap trolleys rumbling down Irving Street. “Gimme some gray to stay, Dale,” meant the fog was in, time to quaff another French roast, bemoan the Giants, kvetch about Reagan or Proposition 13, annotate the personals from the Bay Guardian. While suggesting a favorite lemon curd to the gent browsing in the fedora, or a tart gooseberry to the nurse on break from U.C. Medical Center, my alter ego held court with the regulars. Here were the compatriots and conversations lacking in my undergraduate classes at Berkeley: Iranian backgammon players, itinerant Buddhist window washers, priestess poets, computer hackers.
Anthropologists speak of third places, urban sanctuaries neither home nor work. Regulars at third places don’t want to talk about what they do. What they want to do, what nobody knows they do, is the consensual elixir. I’d ask Fiona about planter’s warts, not law suits, Saeed about Scrabble tournaments, not sales trips, Julia about yonic sculpture, not word processing.
The counter was my culture and serving coffee was fifth business. Crumpets are a fickle lot, as moody as a summer in San Francisco, but that 5 a.m. batch had gone smoother than a Windham Hill sampler. Then I’d dappled the top edges of the convex filter with hot–never boiling–water, a whiff of chicory curling over the counter and out the door, greeting the Inner Sunset’s chill like an old friend who’d moved on but never away, and Fiona and Saeed and Julia asked of my jottings. We regulars talked of my jottings.
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