#3 Window Ornament

I like my life here as a window ornament. I hang on the windowsill or sit in it to watch our street every chance I get. The street is three lanes wide, with two sets of tram rails like embedded train tracks and two electrical lines which run above the trams. The wide, mostly uncobbled sidewalks are lined with shops, pubs, and restaurants.
The plate glass windows of the trafika and tabak are so crowded with alcohol and cigarette products, the papirnictvi with stationery, the drogerie with soaps, cleaners, and cosmetics, and the obuvy with shoes that you can’t even see inside the stores. The fruit and vegetables offered at the ovoce and zelenina and the clothes at the odevy creep from their single doorways so people walking by can make a purchase and tuck it into their shopping bags without ever leaving the sidewalk. There’s a wedding attire business which gets more action than the erotic video rental shop next to it, and a provaznictvi selling mostly rope, which I never see anyone go into.

The first week, I spent more time watching the workers replacing and repairing the tram lines than I did the other passersby. Unlike a road crew back home, they seem to be allowed to wear whatever they want to work. One hot day, there was a man in a bright red coverall and boots, one in paint-spattered plaid shorts and old dress shoes, another in long pants and sneakers, both of them shirtless and getting pinker by the minute in the sun.

They also seemed to be allowed a few other liberties. When nearly the entire crew filed into a pub before eleven one morning, I closed the window, thinking, “Well, that’s it for today,” but a little while later, they all returned to work, one of them still clutching a beer, and the street work was finished more than a day ahead of the posted schedule.

But the attitude towards beer is different here. There is even a line in a famous opera, “Beer is a gift from God. It gives us strength and courage.” The first time one of my Czech friends told me about needing to go for a beer after exercise class, “to get her strength back,” I laughed. Beer is the reason I need exercise. Seriously, beer here is like sweet tea for us; it’s what you drink with meals, or if you’re just plain thirsty.

Of course there are some who don’t seem to know when their thirst has been quenched or their strength and courage have been refilled. The first time I heard anything other than hearty laughter and the odd jukebox song coming out of the nonstop (twenty four –seven) pub across the street, I was shocked. We all rushed to the window to see the results of a collision of wills in the form of a beer bottle to some man’s head. The man, nearly too drunk to stand alone, was offered a chair first inside the doorway, where he was silhouetted like a very thin, dripping version of Rodin’s Thinker, then on the sidewalk. His friend kept him seated while people drifted by, though no one stopped or cast more than a furtive glance, and most passersby changed sidewalks well away from the scene. Only one drunken man who seemed to skate in from down the street, glided up, circled the man in the chair, peered into his face, before rubbing his own and drifting off down the street only to return a minute later to do the same thing again. Both the number on the back of shirt and the pattern of his route said ninety six, so we named him Ninety-six. And when Ninety Six wandered off and around the corner, we closed the window for the day.