I’ve developed a new exercise: I walk briskly out of the complex, take a right and go about a mile on SW 9th Ave. – across Davie Blvd. and State Road 84 – until I reach Old Heidelberg, where I drink a beer.
Yesterday was such a rare day in South Florida; we’re used to wet and, increasingly, we’re used to cold, but not the two together. The combination had me craving a place that felt like a refuge.
I put on the same clothes I wore last year on the Kiso Road: well-worn Mephistos, blue jeans, motorcycle jacket and long black scarf. I left the backpack in the closet. The weather – gray and raw – was another reminder of that walk.
I reached Old Heidelberg in less than half an hour. Two elderly women sat on one side of the bar; two old men sat on the other. They all had white hair, which made them look as if they too had walked to the place, hatless through snow. The women sat in front of cocktails; the men, tall glasses of slowly vanishing beer. There is something about the way a German drinks beer – and a Frenchman drinks wine – that makes it seem not so much a pleasure as an inalienable right.
The room fit my image of a refuge. It dripped with garlands (blue and white paper and plastic leaves), strings of pennants, hanging lamp shades, upside-down glasses. The walls were hung with mirrors, paintings, old farm instruments; the shelves crowded with heavy steins, wicker baskets, duck decoys; the ceiling above the bar bright with stained glass. There were no windows, so you had no idea of the weather outside, or even the country (except for the TV annoyingly tuned to ESPN). I couldn’t decide if I were in a temple of kitsch or a monument to the charms of alcoholism. How easily this visit could become a habit.
Drinking my hefeweizen – “Now don’t try to shave with that,” the bartender had said as he handed me my carefully poured and white-capped beverage – I thought of Patrick Leigh Fermor walking from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. Crossing Bavaria in winter, he had warmed himself in places like this, part of the picaresque journey and supreme education that produced A Time of Gifts.
Then I paid and walked back home, thinking with pity of people on treadmills.
