Wolf At The Door

There's this very realistic cheap statue of a dog outside the bathroom at Rebecca's and it startles me every time I turn to close the door, and every time I walk out.

Sudden barking scares me, and I distrust dogs I see on the street.

Once, I was playing badminton in my driveway, and the neighbor's dog ran up to me and tried to bite me. It bit a hole in my shorts and I whacked it without remorse.

When I used to walk the 15 minutes home from Cilantro at 4 A.M., the dogs would all be asleep. I would walk in the middle of the road, lest I wake the snarls chambered under the wheel wells.

Istanbul was Constantinople

I was just making myself coffee in a French press, with cardamom, and I was thinking to myself, "What would I call this drink if I were selling it in a shop?" and of course I thought, "Turkish coffee," because that's what it tastes like. But I wasn't 100% sure if that's what Turkish coffee is, and at any rate, the cardamom isn't ground with the coffee, and certainly, I thought, the Greeks would object. I remember hearing once that the Greeks call Turkish coffee Greek coffee.

I would need to name my beverage something that 1) does not claim to be Turkish coffee, since it is not prepared in the way I understand to be traditional 2) acknowledges the existence of the beverage's wider constituency and 3) sounds intriguing.

And then I remembered that song from fifth grade, that I can't remember if I secretly or openly loved. I remember really wishing I could understand the refrain of the verse. I would call my drink that.