Ode to a Cafe Chair

Carl Sagan once said that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  I wasn't familiar with that quote, but one of my students paraphrased it recently in a discussion of world-making and the quest for purity and authenticity.  She misattributed it to the late great Douglas Adams--who knew a thing or two about hitchhiking through made-from-scratch universes--and thought it was about bread not apple pies, which I like better.  Bread, we need that.  Apple pies, not so much. 

If you really want to begin with scratch you have to follow the line, the chain of refining, processing, and cultivating to its logical beginning, eschewing the packaged and the pre-mixed, pretty soon you’re thinking about growing wheat, then contemplating harvesting wild grasses to cross-breed, and before long you’re trying to make water from an oxygen atom and a couple of hydrogens. Even the simplest things in our world are apex achievements.

If you wish to design a nice little sidewalk café, you must first shape a city. With your effortless plop into a movable chair at a too-tiny table on the sidewalk, you sit atop a Jenga tower of cultural biases, public policies, zoning adjustments, permitting, mobility technologies, traffic engineering, power struggles over public space, NIMBY-ism, urban forestry, architectural decisions, and, ultimately, the industrial design, manufacture and distribution of that lightweight chair which you can scooch with one hand, while your café Americano is in the other, from the location in which you found it to the vastly preferable half inch to the north northwest, just so you can demonstrate your agency in this fringe of public space lapping at the shores of the private interior whence your coffee came.  All this so you can sit alone and among countless others, spectators and participants, in the great exercise of urban leisure.