The parking garage at work is five blocks away from my office building, but there’s a really terrific coffee shop between points A and B. The proprietors are Moroccan, and because their dialect and demeanor are so close to Tunisian I feel very much at home there.

I usually stop for a hot coffee on my way into work in the morning and for an iced latte on my way home. I always get one of those cardboard jacket thingies for the cup because I don’t want to burn my hand as I walk to the office, or freeze it as I walk to the car.

Suddenly, today, that seemed so absurd. I thought about drinking coffee in Tunisia, where a cup was a sit-down affair, not a perambulatory accessory. I always had my direkt in a small glass, and on a cold day I would have wrapped my hands around it to draw out the warmth, storing it up against an evening in an unheated apartment. On hot days, if I ordered a Fanta from the refrigerator, I would have held the bottle against my wrist to cool the maximum amount of blood before drinking it and going out into the sun-parched streets.

I’m not discounting the wonders of modern HVAC, but sometimes I do feel my life has become a little too insulated.