An Interlude in an Italian Restaurant

Yesterday evening Te. and I cycled to eastern Berlin where our office is. The trees are still very green, but lacings of linden leaf-petals are curling along the edges of the sidewalks, and elsewhere I've seen chestnuts and acorns scattered along the chestnuts. As it was Friday, the customary madness had set in, and we were amongst scores of hipsters who had gathered to sit in front of restaurants, throng at the waterfronts, ride bicycles along the infernal car gridlock of Skalitzer Straße (where a red ambulance, a fire ladder truck, and a white-and-blue police van managed to squeeze past the compact cars and BVG public transit bus), walk hand-in-hand in parks, drink and socialize. We rattled along under the mildly grubby, postered and graffiti'd classical-style plaster façades and sett stones of Friedrichshain, bypassed the Rigaer Straße regions, and found the Italian restaurant.

We were meeting a former colleague, our manager, for the first time in person since he left the company. I sat down at the golden, lacquered table underneath the awning and ignored the red-tasseled menu for the present to look at the tree with splashes of gold (like sunlight), the beige-yellow house façade, the red-and-black-brick church that was very 19th century and oddly rural for this city district, and the dipping long tail of a magpie that swooped in silhouette beyond it. The sky was blue and the clouds wispy and few, the temperature milder than it has often been lately. To. came striding up very soon after, and Te. came back out to the table, and we had a lovely meal and conversation.

I was wound up tensely as a jack-in-a-box after what have frankly been awful-and-partly-wonderful-but-as-mentioned-also-awful weeks at work.

But by the time my pizza with its thin pieces of eggplant, crinkly champignon mushroom, wine-flavored artichoke, and grainy parmesan had been dissected and eaten, and we had talked about tons of topics — babies, bicycle lanes that had popped up during the coronavirus era, soccer, Israeli elections, Netflix, .... — I began to feel relaxed and happy again. He also talked of his partner and his family, we talked about our brothers and mother too. It was nice to glimpse the larger circle of people whom he cares for, and to know that some things are turning out very well, as we wish for him.

I naïvely said that I hadn't seen many signs of the economic depression that had been predicted as a consequence of the coronavirus. He set me straight by pointing out that people he knew had lost their jobs, and that sectors of the population would have trouble finding their first job or regaining a last job before retirement. It was a reminder that I and my colleagues are exceptionally lucky to be employed and paid well.

To a degree, I still think that I have a small right to be unhappy with how things are going, at present, in the company for which I work. But there are of course so many bright spots in it as well. I hope that finding safe ways to meet with colleagues and others again will cheer me up. My social distancing was less rigid for a while. But then I realized that even if I do not catch the coronavirus or become ill from it, being quarantined and forcing everyone I've recently spent more than 15 minutes with to suspend their lives likewise, is the type of risk that one needs to think about properly. So that's why I've felt a little tense, too.