The morning after she arrived, we did a tour of the Square and ended up at the sidewalk café that sprawls out from under celebrated Harvard’s Holyoke Center toward the famous Out of Town News-Stand, across from the Yard and in walking distance of the Fogg Museum, the Longfellow House, and the Blacksmith House, but Leah was impervious to historical renown. She caught on to the propinquity of contemporary celebrity thanks to the dogs, whose presence in an eating establishment was illegal, but who’d been easy to smuggle into the outskirts and stash under one of the tables that are more on the sidewalk than actually in the café. Practically all my father remembers of his one trip to France is that dogs were allowed in restaurants, and according to an article in a recent issue of Dog Fancy, they’re still welcome. To sneak a dog into an American café called Au Bon Pain is simply to add authenticity, as the proprietors must realize, even though the Cambridge (so-called) Health Department doesn’t.
