Sangria nights: on this evening in 2015, drinking sangria at Café California and watching the crowds go by on Church Street. My friends Vince and Leticia Moneva owned the restaurant from 1988 until 2013, when the sold it and retired to Spain.
I always miss their iteration of the restaurant, but never more so than during the summer months. Cafe C. was my unofficial headquarters for more than two decades. I dined with friends, or alone with a book and a notebook. Vince and Leticia were family to me, and their daughter, Angie, a niece of the heart.
I wrote about Angie and the restaurant in Other Men's Sons. One of my friends who worked there was the model for one of the characters in Enter, Night. The boys on the staff became friends, and many of them are still in my life today. It was a privilege, in many cases, to watch them grow up in front of me, and to make note of it.
When the second iteration of Café C. went out of business some years back, it was the second end of an era. Those years live in memory now, like amber.
But this picture brings some of those memories back. It was a hot, humid night. The boys set me up at the best "people watching" table on the patio, and kept the sangria coming. So many friends were walking on Church Street. They stopped by the table to exchange a hug and say hello.
There wasn't an untended moment that glorious night.
In the sharp medicinal fog of the current post-pandemic PTSD, that joy—that innocence, really—seems almost impossibly halcyon, and almost impossible to access. I can't imagine ever getting back to that place in my mind, or in my heart. We're all struggling to regain our equilibrium.
Thank God for the transportive power of photographs, and all praise for the gift of beloved friends far away.
