Lucky for me it's midnight and they haven't started putting the chairs onto the tables yet. I got a late start writing today, and in the evening it's sometimes hard to tell which places are about to close and which ones will still be going strong several hours from now. The waiter has hand-inflated the price of my espresso by 50 cents, which may be the way they subsidize their after-hours business. Or maybe he's just a little low on cash tonight.

It's a relatively big place, and all the tables I can see, inside and out, are small and round. Mine has a marble top and a greenish-yellow metal rim. My sugar cube packet had three cubes in it. Not that they were really cube-shaped, but are they ever? When did sugar cube manufacturers get such a large degree of poetic license? Maybe I should just use the all-encompassing term "lumps," but that just reminds me of Bugs Bunny hitting someone on the head with a mallet.

There's some blues music playing. A few other people are here, but not really enough to justify a place of this size being open so late. Good thing they don't know that. Actually, it looks like they are about to start mopping part of the floor. Maybe this place is open all night. I'm sure I'll never know. I'll be leaving soon enough.