Across the parking lot is a boy, sitting in the back of a Jeep.  The tailgate is up, and he’s hunched over a book.  He only has a few pages to go until the end, and with at least 29 minutes still left on the dryer, he should finish it but won’t.  Some other time, he thinks, and closes the book.  He has an unsettled, distracted look about him – like he is waiting for someone or something to happen without knowing who it may be or what it is he really wants to come to pass.  He picks up his pipe and considers lighting it.  Then he wonders if he doesn’t look like a fool, sitting in the back of his car, smoking a pipe in the Metro Laundromat parking lot.  So he fiddles with his phone for a while and plays “za” on Words With Friends.  It’s a double letter score for 22 points, and he knows it’s a shit move and a shit word, but he needs the easy points.  He also needs to know what song is on the radio – it’s a late 20′s dixieland stomper by Richard “My Knee” Jones or King Oliver, and definitely has the old New Orleans sound with which he’s familiar.  He’s a long way from that place, and may soon be going farther still.  Perhaps that’s what preoccupies him.  Perhaps not.

But the boy likes being here.  Surely, its kind of a shithole and sitting out in the car like this leaves a few things to be desired.  It’s good thinking time, though.  So he thinks.  And like any boy, he can’t think about much before he begins thinking about girls.  He remembers the one he misses, he feels sorry about the one he’s hurt, and he longs for the one he’s not yet met.  There is no conclusion to these thoughts, no easy resolution, so he chases them away by heading back inside.  Maybe by now those 29 minutes have passed and it’s time to change the laundry.  If not, he’ll wait and stand and stare into one of those dark portals as everything continues to spin around him.

Mr. Nevil had worked all over the world doing this, from Bangkok to Barking.  Now he was sitting with me, remembering the harbors he had inhabited at one time or another, rolling a piece of blue chalk in his fingers, suddenly meditative.

It was, he murmured, a dangerous profession, of course.  And it was painful to realize that nothing was permanent, not even an ocean liner … He had been there to help dismantle the Normandie — “the most beautiful ship ever built” — as it lay charred and half drowned in the Hudson River in America.  “But somehow even that was beautiful … because in a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade.  You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.”

- Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table.

Happy New Year.

by Tom Gauld