Main Street Cafe
Article
Main Street Cafe is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2024 and December 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It’s like a diner but cozier”. It most often appears alongside A Night Before Christmas, Annabel, Bob Dylan.
Metadata
- Category: Venues
- Mention count: 1
- Issue count: 1
- First seen: December 28, 2024
- Last seen: December 28, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- A Night Before Christmas (1 shared issues)
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- Annabel (1 shared issues)
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- Bob Dylan (1 shared issues)
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- Bob Dylan biopic (1 shared issues)
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- bohemia (1 shared issues)
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- Boston (1 shared issues)
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- Budapest (1 shared issues)
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- Cafe Vittoria (1 shared issues)
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- Cassidy (1 shared issues)
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- Chloe Pingeon (1 shared issues)
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- Collected Agenda (1 shared issues)
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- Colonial Inn (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Christmas Eve Dinner is my favorite meal of the year, but David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It's like a diner but cozier, he says. The alcove is tucked away down a driveway, near a parking lot, the real restaurant faces the street and it's decked in pine wreaths and dried chains of cranberry and orange. Upstairs, it's bustling. There's a long wait by the pastry shelf. To bring you your food here, in the alcove, the waiter comes outside, walks down the driveway, the door bursts open, we're the only ones left inside. Sitting at the hidden little bar, David convinces me to share corn clam chowder and onion rings - fantastic but now I'm full. I still eat at dinner later. Roast duck and roast goose and cranberry sauce and pie. It feels sweet, and not gluttonous. The season doesn’t feel gluttonous this year. I used to be so averse to this sin - gluttony, that is. Overindulgence hasn’t crossed my mind too much these past few weeks, I suppose a natural conclusion if you believe overdoing it to be a product of self destruction, and not pleasure. This year, I can access Christmas in a way that I can’t recall experiencing similarly since childhood. I like when winter is visceral. A visceral winter is my favorite season. I would like to feel the cold in my bones this year. I would like to feel nostalgia in bursts that are sharp when I walk around certain corners at dusk. I get everything I would like this year. It doesn’t unsettle me. It just means my memories are more precise. It’s a strange thing, to come back into yourself that is. Thursday We sleep til ten, light candles on the Christmas tree, polar swim in Walden Pond. Breakfast is maple butter on toast. Linner is cranberry moscow mules and cocktail shrimp. Later - an icy woods behind the house. The boardwalk over the swamp is caked with snow. I can see Saturn in the sky, even in the early afternoon. There's a Christmas Tree in the woods; a pine strung with ornaments, red and green ornaments, no lights because it's too deep in the forest to power them. We only see one other group on our walk; a family pulling a child in a snowsuit on a sled. Old friends come over for Christmas. You wonder, with these things, if there will still be things to say but then it seems, there always is. I feel grateful to have grown up in the presence of characters. People whose aesthetic and ethical sensibilities remain solid and unique and admirable. We have lasagna and salad by the fire and then pie made from a special type of sweet squash with homemade sweet cream. My mom is telling a story about the sheep farmer across the street and the fist fight she got into at the town swap exchange (the scavenging table at the dump) that got the whole operation shut down for years. The swap exchange was getting out of hand. My mother was being solicited for two hundred dollars in the parking lot to relinquish the neighbor's china that she'd spotted abandoned only five minutes before. The swap exchange was a nice thing though, environmentally friendly. You wouldn't believe the age of the women throwing hands over discarded silver. The dinner table conversation turns to strength of heart. "She has a good heart, they are saying, re the elderly women prone to physical blows over perfectly good silver. “She has a good heart but she has common sense too, and if you are not doing the common sense thing, then she will not withhold harshness.” My parents and their friends are shrugging. Sensibility does come with age. I've been learning this more lately. Level headedness when appropriate, too. Discretion when it comes to suffering fools, gladly or otherwise. We have many special items from the swap table around the house, and I used to find trinkets more of an inconvenience than a joy but I like the red table cloth with the little green and silver pine trees, the metal stars and chimes candle that spins and jingles when lit, the field of rocking horses always growing and dwindling by one or two but remaining a herd of sorts in my parents backyard. I can't stay here very long. The sense of interiority, quiet, the pale beauty of shifting light marking hours and time... it is lovely but it's also in conflict with my sensibility. This is symptomatic of some rot, likely. In another life I am endlessly entertained in the birch trees. Going to bed, it’s been dark for a while now. Here, you see one star first every night. The sun has been setting in a special shade of pale blue this winter. It was dark out the windows by dinner time. You could still see the shadows in the fields. Friday I consider changing my train back to New York, staying here a bit longer, sinking into hazy dusks and evenings by the wood stove and the fires. There was a gas leak in the furnace and so now the gas is off. We've been using the wood stove and the fires a lot. I don't change trains because it's too last minute. I'll become too suspended in time if I stay. There's a pink sunset over salt marshes in places like Mystic, Connecticut on the ride back to the city. I've been trying to work on the things I've put off for too long. I'm been trying to think about the way people talk about culture as I try to write a few reviews. I wrote this sentiment before Christmas -- I know that there are things I'm supposed to be scandalized by, and I'm not really scandalized, but I also remain defensive - it's the worst of all worlds. I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp. It's difficult for me. God it feels good to agree with whatever the person speaking is saying. Now, the truth of it becomes -- morality as a simulacra is so dull. I can spend two seconds in real life and it hits me so starkly how much imitations of reality pale in its contrast. The diagnostics of the times suggests that the individual life becomes more and more disconnected from the collective life, your sphere of influence shrinks as the mirror world of technology gives you every reason to believe it grows, the word of the times isn't nihilism so much as absurdism. One symbol is easily swapped out for its opposite - they bear little material or spiritual significance. You know you don’t mean it. After the terrible Bob Dylan biopic, we're driving on the highway towards the train station and my dad is asking me if there are examples of contemporary genius, what that would look like, and I'm saying that the thing is you have to make a concerted effort to even engage with art at all now, or sometimes to engage even with real life at all and it's an effort that goes against most of the forces in your day to day and so the thing is I think genius is unlikely, although there are contemporary artists I admire and genius implies some innate transcendency of the general malaise anyway, so maybe these issues are irrelevant in the face of genius. A conversation at a coffee shop a few weeks ago - a younger man of the Monarchy school of thought is saying that an ideal society would not ask people to deal in the realm of public good and ruling provenance. Your sphere of influence is yourself and those around you, the best thing that can be done is we drop the illusion. An older man is saying but I've seen you be hugely influenced by the teachings of people you've never met. He's saying that now more than ever, we are living in an age that is cruel. I appreciate his point because - I appreciate learned wisdom and practicality only earned through time. And because, isn't it strange to say that now, more than ever, we live in real life? Finding pure purpose in interiority- this is something that can be learned. It's not something I've learned yet, though. Pure Purpose in Interiority WHAT YOU SHOULD DO This week is prone to slip into oblivion of the sort where you won't really know what you did at all. There is not a ton going on in New York – it's hard to throw a party during a week that doesn't exist. But, you needn't become senselessly bored! Sunday, December 29 From 7pm at KGB – Cassidy and Annabel present The Last Confessions of 2024