Two places in memory

Sometimes remembered places come into your mind for no reason.

1. Some shops in a downtown. In a building that was mostly glass, at the end of a mall, two or three stories. One of those sets of shops that are sandwiched in between other tall buildings in a downtown. I am pretty sure there was an aggressively fashionable surf-and-skate-wear shop that was pitched to much younger and cooler folks than me. I had lunch or a snack in a food court or fast food place within it, but it wasn't your usual mass fast food like McDonald's or KFC, it was like a juice shop or bagels or gourmet salads or something. The kind of place grumpy people went to grab lunch on their lunch hour, and the grumpy servers serve them the same things every day, and no one makes eye contact because it's just grabbing lunch on your lunch hour. I remember feeling vaguely uneasy, I think I had walked a long way to get to this place and it was just at the edge of my walkability - I needed to head back so my feet didn't wear out, and also I think I had to focus so as not to get lost.

But what I really noticed on remembering this funny random place I went to once was that when I was there it seemed like a place in an exotic foreign land, some strange big city far away where I didn't feel at home, and would probably never go back again. But in fact, I think it was in San Francisco. Not an exotic foreign land any more, not a big strange city that I'll never go back to. If I wanted to, I could hop a plane first thing tomorrow morning and nearly be there in time to have an intimidating and overpriced gourmet salad or bagel with all the grumpy working people, tomorrow.

2. The smell of an Old El Paso Salsa bottle being rinsed out in my sink for some reason brought back the low end of Glebe Point Road, the section near the tappas place and the bus stops, where it comes up on Broadway. Glebe also seemed a bit exotic to me, because it was on the opposite side of Sydney Uni to where I lived. I did manage to hang out at that end of Glebe Pt Rd quite a bit in that year before I moved - some dinners with the group that went to Belvoir St plays, when the Belvoir St Theatre was being renovated and they were held in the Seymour Centre. A couple of auxiliary Philorum events. One lovely afternoon coming back from a Book Club meeting, when I took myself out for coffee and shopping - I think that was the day I bought all those Haruki Murakami books, they had them buy-one-get-one-free and I got six altogether.

There was a Mexican place that opened up down there, a very American style Mexican place. I loved it, the neighbors I took to it loved it so much we went three or four times before I left. But my colleague who had married a girl from Mexico hated it so much he was actually quite nasty - "If you could call that food" he wrote in his IM message to me the next morning at work. It was all kind of oversized and deep-fried with cheese on everything. American style. But the flavors were really good, I thought. And the rooms were lovely - two adjoined rooms that had been the front rooms of two terraces, with all the wood trim painted white and very homey and inviting windows looking outside to the road. And somehow the smell of grocery store salsa brought back, via that restaurant, the whole end of the road, and then more particularly an occasion of walking away from an auxiliary Philorum event and John B. going to the bus stop and everyone looking at him like sheep, craving more attention, craving an invitation to go where he was going, and the group eventually walking to Central, but me, the yuppie, catching a cab. It was black night, with the red lights of the stoplight on the corner, and the street signs and a sense of movement from the cars and busses and cabs, like when you expose a nighttime city photo for a long time and the traffic all becomes just long stripes of light. That's my sense of that particular stretch of Glebe Point Road.