In every major town of France and most of Europe, the pharmacists take turns at staying open all night and on holidays.  In a similar way, Berkeley Espresso is the de facto café on guard on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I discovered that this morning, as I looked out the window this morning of Christmas, the street at its quietest, but the purple neon sign lit, and the only possible destination of walkers.
Not one minute after I arrived, a long line of people formed behind me, as if I had attracted them like a magnet on my short wandering.  Perhaps we were all mysteriously synchronized, but for a minute I didn’t know whether to take my coffee to go, because a couple had entered and decided to reserve the counter stools for their own sense of security.  Fortunately, the man grabbed a table as soon as its current occupant showed signs of liberating it, and I could continue my plan of sitting in a corner of the counter to write this.
This café has a strange configuration caused by its regular customers sitting behind computers along the windows and the wall, giving everyone else the feeling that they are being observed and notes are being taken.  In fact, I’m writing with pen and paper from the counter and it’s interesting to think that many of us are writing randomly about each other.  Perhaps I am part of a character in someone’s novel, or my demeanor helped prove a new theorem.
One thing I know about those people with computers, is that they’re not watching movies.  There’s a notice on the counter asking that they not do so because it clogs the Internet for everyone else.  I suppose someone watched movies once and the other users staged a revolt, alerting the person that not everything can be free in life.
It’s interesting to observe how people behave while waiting for their variation on the coffee milk and sugar theme.  I suppose it’s not unlike the chickens in a chicken coop wondering why the farmer has come inside and if he has something for them.  If he throws grain around, the chickens have to decide which grain they’re going after and hope that another hasn’t its eyes on the same.  Something similar happens at the counter, as the barista makes a drink, sets it on the counter and calls its name.  People look at the drink and scan the rest of the crowd for a taker, mentally calculating their position in the queue, and hoping there isn’t a mistake.  Maybe someone else ordered the same before or after them, and maybe the barista made the wrong drink or called it the wrong name perhaps in a Freudian slip caused by the Christmas colors of their sweater.  Drinks usually sort themselves out, but the customers may talk about the dramatic event to a group later that night, mentioning the chicken coop, and the Marketing people behind the mirror have an Ah ah moment, wondering if the solution could be patentable and made exclusive to their chain of coffee shops worldwide so that nobody will ever want to go to a coffee shop that exposes you to uncertainty as if you were in a chicken coop.
Well it’s Christmas day, and the chicken coop experience may not be altogether different for the millions of children and adults who participate in the traditional gift exchange, having spent the entire night wrapping the gifts and then secretly placing them under the elaborately decorated tree.  You look under the tree, scanning the various packages and trying to guess which one is for you.  You walk close to it, hoping to find a label negligently left visible, so you can start an early estimation of what’s for whom.  You wonder if the largest box could be for you, despite the fact that you couldn’t come up with a good list of anything you wanted for more than five minutes.
The drinks on the counter have all been allocated.  A new couple has come to sit at the counter.  She ordered a smoked salmon sandwich, I suppose because she wanted a bagel and they were out of bagels, but what can you do when you’re in the only place open with food to serve.  The man looks at me as if he could figure out if I’m someone famous he can’t quite place.  He could be a writer himself, or worse, the author of comics who is known to sit in this café and to have featured the building across the street in one of his strips.  Or he could be bored, which I would be if I sat at a counter of any café found on Christmas morning when nothing else is open, when there are no news in the newspaper, when there’s no work to do, and when you’d like to have something new happening between you and your companion, something other than finding smoked salmon in sliced bread rather than in a bagel.
A woman at the counter marvels at having found this café open today, as if everyone else in here was just part of the scene she discovered on her lonely quest around town.  Yes, we all feel like the world has suddenly become a vast desert and we have found an oasis.  But in less than twenty-four hours everything will be back to normal, and no more discovery will be possible for a while.
Harold Pinter died today, and I remember reading his plays in school but I don’t think I have seen them performed.  I just heard that on the radio, along with the interview of the Alaskan bird hunter stranded in Seattle without his shotguns.  Californian birds got a holiday too.