Sitting in the window

For good or ill, I spend a lot of time in this window.

It's a pleasant window, the counter behind it is covered with brass - or bronze, some kind of tastefully patina'd metal, with tall bar-stool type chairs, power plugs and ethernet jacks at just the right height.

There are three shows going on at once - one in my head/laptop, one in the shop behind me (and don't think there isn't an occasional twinge of nervousness at what I hear at my back) and the really fun one on the street in front of me.

A rapid-fire exchange in Spanish goes on to my right, a young madman flashes down the slope of Exchange Street on a skateboard.

It was here, using owner Jonathan Gate's house iMacs (one of which is still working) that I saw my first published piece of music online.  A teaching colleague of mine was working the espresso bar that night and I was treated to a cafe mocha with a treble clef and full staff drawn in chocolate syrup on the cap of steamed milk.

It's almost inevitable that I'll see people I know walk by (or some people I'd like to know).  This stretch of Exchange is the home for some fairly swanky (or, more "swankish") shops - but not so much so that a good representative cross section of Portland's denizens can't be observed.

Once a new piece gets written it's a good place to come to do the editing of bowings, dynamics, articulations and other diacritical markings that make a new score playable.  The background music is not too obnoxious - though there was one day I came in here to actually work out some new parts in my head at the same time that a string duet was playing in the window.  That made it a little hard - though I was able to adapt one of my tangos to a duet and they did a very nice job of sight-reading it.

Strange connections get made here - almost like the front door comes from one world and the back door opens onto quite another.  One evening I rudely intruded myself into a discussion of chord tones and dissonance (one of my pet peeves) with someone I later discovered to be Prof. B, one of our tango doyennes and a French professor at an area liberal arts college.

So it's kind of Portland's little Diagon Alley - a place where you meet all kinds of people, since, as anyone can tell you, this town is coffee-mad - and as we end this most lovely of Autumns, we're going to need the caffeination for the winter to come.