The Architecture of Second Acts

That resolute Australian rain arrived as invocation on our last day in Perth. Keith and I had mapped our day’s itinerary which included a small local-born eatery for lunch. But weather, that great editor of intention, narrowed our radius to what stood directly beside our accommodation: Dôme, its windows lambent with the promise of shelter.

How often do we pause to mull over our last days in a place? A peculiar telescoping of perception, an almost painful receptivity to detail that transforms the ordinary into the archaeological. When our time somewhere becomes finite, we become custodians of the ephemeral, gathering what will remain in memory when geography intervenes. Traveling with a teenager amplifies this: not melancholy but wonder, a shared witnessing of what is rather than what we'd curated ourselves into believing should be.

The rain that morning became our co-author. We stepped inside.

Phil May (co-founder of Dôme) was an Olympian, a triple jumper fluent in the body's calculus of force and flight. In 1970, he took gold at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. At the Mexico Olympics, he achieved a personal best of 17.02 meters, a number that represents thousands of hours of micro-adjustments, the athlete's monastic attention to the space between good enough and transcendent.

Then came injury, that hard stop, the body's veto. And May channeled it. He acquired a beautiful French antique coffee roaster in Melbourne and had it shipped to Perth. From triple jump to hand-roasting: both arts of transformation, both sciences of the incremental, both practices demanding serious attention to meaning.

That French roaster lodges in my imagination like a splinter of light. I have come to understand that objects are repositories not merely of function but of accumulated gesture, carriers of every careful hand that worked them. An antique roaster knows things. It knows about the Maillard reaction's delicate threshold, about the moment when caramelisation edges toward char (something perhaps no algorithm can replicate).

May's choice of an antique over something efficient and new was an act of philosophy disguised as pragmatism. To work with such a machine is to enter into dialogue with lineage, to acknowledge that certain forms of making resist velocity, demand presence. It is the difference between word processing and letterpress, between recording and live performance. The roaster's age meant it could not be hurried or fooled. It was pedagogy in the shape of equipment.

Sitting in that café as rain scored the windows, I thought about inheritance. The inheritance of approach, the ways we absorb method and meaning through the tools we choose. May's restoration of that roaster was an argument for the visible process, for making that refuses to hide its own labour. It was, in its quiet way, a resistance to the culture of frictionless convenience.

Here is the paradox that rain illuminated: we had planned to seek out Perth's idiosyncratic businesses, to find the singular and unrepeatable. Instead, weather and proximity delivered us to what technically qualifies as a chain across multiple countries. But I have learned, through years of examining how scale and intimacy negotiate their relationship, that size does not automatically dilute meaning.

We had plotted our final Perth hours with care, had drawn up itineraries and possibilities. Rain said: stay close. And in staying close, we found distance. The distance of Phil May's journey from Olympian to artisan, the distance traveled by those heritage buildings from abandonment to vitality, the distance between our accommodation and a place that held, in its walls and its rituals, something worth carrying forward into memory.

Three months after the trip, we’re having fish burgers on an unusually warm afternoon, and Keith recalls the fish tacos we had in Dôme. Me, I remembered how plans; even careful, considered plans are perhaps occasionally just scaffolding for surprise. How the most resonant encounters often require no pilgrimage, await us in our immediate radius, patient as weather.

It was raining on our last morning in Perth, and we stayed close to home, and we found something worth carrying forward. Which is, I think, what last days are for: not grand farewells but small noticings, the kind that accumulate into meaning, into the particular texture of having been somewhere with someone, paying attention together, sheltering from the rain.