Home by Another Way by Robert Benson

dinner questions keep affecting the lunch plan as well. Which is particularly key on St. Cecilia. If you can get the food-event committee meeting to go your way, then you can get yourself downtown in Princetown around noon. According to minutes of the meeting, if there had been minutes, I would have been seen to be angling for fried chicken atthe Heptagon, which is what I would be happy to do every day in St. Cecilia. What I am really angling for, I have come to realize, is a chance to be among the people in this new world of mine. And a chance to see if my place in it has changed at all.

    The lunch hour in Princetown is crowded.
    The schoolchildren are out for lunch, for one thing. We watch them parade up and down the streets in their uniforms. Each school has different colors, and the uniforms are neatly pressed and clean and shining in the sun. The children move in packs along the sidewalks and in the courtyards of the cafés and snackettes. They laugh and cut up the way children everywhere do. We love to watch them.
    The sidewalks fill up with businesspeople and shopkeepers and government workers too. The men are in ties and polished shoes; the women are in skirts andhigh heels. They stroll elegantly and languidly to lunch and back.
    There are the taxi drivers and the dockworkers and the others whose work requires less formal dress. The square is full of taxis and vans, and the sounds are of music from the cafés and of people shouting greetings across the street and into shop doorways. Car horns beep cheerfully, and the policeman at the square blows his whistle to direct the traffic.
    St. Cecilia is a melting pot. I expect that is true of the other island nations in this part of the world, but I do not know for sure. Any crowd of people anywhere in St. Cecilia is liable to include people of all sorts of colors and origins. The population is primarily African in origin, but everywhere you go, you will find Europeans, East Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans as well.
    Nowhere is the global village more apparent than at the Heptagon.
    Essentially a lime bar with a one-room kitchen, the Heptagon is a small open-air restaurant that sits alongthe harbor in Princetown. Someone hung a wraparound porch along the harbor side and put three or four picnic tables in the front. There are a dozen or so stools at the counter and an open-air poolroom in a separate building a few feet away.
    We go there for fried chicken and johnnycakes. They offer other things to eat, but we have not yet gotten past the fried chicken and the johnnycakes.
    We order our food, and Jessica goes into the back. We then hear this wham, wham, wham sound made by a cleaver chopping our fried chicken into manageable chunks. We wait a little longer, and then when the food finally comes, we sit and eat and watch a fair portion of the world go by.

    I am not really a lime bar kind of person.
    Some of that, I like to think, has to do with a kind of innate sense of dignity, which, if you met me, you would discern right away. Okay, maybe it is a dignity Ihope to have and I think I have from time to time. It could just be shyness and a lack of solid conversational skills.
    The other reason I am not a local-hangout person is that when I was young, I was one of those people who got picked on, and I have made it a habit over the years to stay away from places that look as though the people might be rough in any way.
    Also, I like my meals to be served on white tablecloths, and I like my fellow diners to be well dressed, and I like to be in places where people talk in hushed tones even when they are laughing and telling stories.
    In my life in the States, there are only two exceptions.
    One is the little neighborhood restaurant about eight blocks from our house. It is by no means a hangout sort of place—they make things with truffles sometimes, and they have wine tastings, and the staff is always dressed in black—but we know so many people there that making any