Matt McCambridge

Unwillingly wide awake at 4am (my mind unable to relocate from China to California as fast as American Airlines could physically deliver my skull and contents), I was reading some of your National Public Radio pieces via a stained secondhand paperback which I’d procured and stockpiled for such a contingency. I had splashed tomato basil marinara on it recently and was comforted to see how in color and consistency the book’s other red stains matched this new one. Although I’d kind of liked my “tubercular prospector who couldn’t get NPR in his silver mine” theory as well. I had been anxious fearing the impaired cognitive performance sleep deprivation would bring to my Important Tasks. But your work caused reinterpretation of this pre-dawn alertness as delicious opportunity. My sleepless brain soon found itself rattling in a BART carriage through glowing fog towards bagels–bagels which were said to be boiled, hardly a given on this coast.
Lifting mist and newly-spilled sunshine, clouds of actual pink water–fat, even–presiding regally, irregularly lighting and thus curating with uneven emphasis the details of 24thst. Poetic license should allow me to say that such a beam spot-lit the steam-fogged windows of the bagel shop but on this plane its glass doors don’t face that way. Three middle-aged Chinese men and women had finished boiling bagels and were efficiently scooping enormous regular spheres of cream cheese from a plastic vat into two-dimensional countertop arrays of takeout containers. They were so unobtrusively magician-quick at getting incoming customers resupplied and ambling out that each one or two of them who strolled in could imagine if they chose that they were among a select few who knew about this place. I started with a single cinnamon raisin, untoasted, and some coffee. It met spec.