It’s a new Dunkin’ Donuts, across from the Wishing-Well Laundromat and from a Lukoil gas station ($1.55 a gallon), diagonal to a 7-11. Within 100 yards there are three barber shops, a hairdresser, a pizzeria, an Italian restaurant, a small bank, an old-style American café serving breakfast and lunch, the Hall of Frames frame shop, and Common Cents Cleaners. The fire department and the hardware stores are nearby in one direction, the post office and a veterinarian in another.

I love to find the foreign equivalent of Americana when abroad, and now I’ve come upon the American equivalent of that favorite French travel scene whereby one stops in a café in a village in, say, the Loire Valley, and is in awe at how French everything is: the waiter, the cashier/owner, the coffee, the conversation (at least the tone and expressions if you don’t understand the words), the way people greet each other and say good-bye, the bakery next door, the wine cellar nearby, the butcher shop, the 12th-century church with the metacarpal of a local saint in a side chapel, village hall, the monument to the dead of WWI, WWII, perhaps the War in Indochina, the gas station (now $6 a gallon), the ANPE unemployment office.

So here I am at the West Trenton, NJ, equivalent of that French village scene. People, place, and me among and within them, having coffee and a toasted coconut donut.

By the counter there’s a plastic Christmas tree with donut decorations and donut boxes and coffee cups as gifts at the base. Three people are working behind the counter: a woman in DnD yellow, a woman in DnD pink, a man in a blue sweat jacket. They probably arrived not too long ago from India. They speak halting, cheerful English with the customers and a distant language with each other.

I step around the "Caution Wet Floor" sign, marvel at the array of donuts, and order a toasted coconut donut and coffee with milk. I comment that there was a closed gas station on this spot last time I was here. "Same owner," says the man in blue.

I pay and take my coffee and donut to a seat at a table by the window.

The woman in pink and the man in blue are serving customers who enter one every minute or so. There’s never a line since each takes a cash register when necessary, something that’s unimaginable in France. The people behind the counter are always smiling and friendly and greet everyone as a regular. Perhaps they are.

A stout woman is buying gift cards at one register when a policeman stops in for coffee "cream, sugar, and put some extra sugar in there." The tall, chesty cop tells the stout woman, "Great choice, beats wrappin’ gifts." The woman now tells an earnest story of how she knows a bunch of women who occasionally meet at Dunkin’ Donuts. She says to the man in blue, "I bet you’ve never sold anyone fifteen $5 gift cards before." The man smiles and says, "Many friends, very good." The woman continues with her story, telling how some of those friends live in Trenton, others in Ewing, one in Lawrence, one across the bridge in Pennsylvania, but they always meet at Dunkin’ Donuts.

"Lots around," says the cop. He looks up at woman in pink, "Did you put in extra sugar?"

"Yes, sir" she says with a smile. "Extra sugar for our friend."

Taking a sip of my coffee I realize that the man in blue put sugar in mine, perhaps even extra sugar. I go up to the counter to get another cup. He’s busy with the gift cards so I tell the woman in pink that I only wanted coffee and milk.

"You just want milk?"

 "Yes, just milk in the coffee."

 "No sugar?"

 "Right."

 "Just milk, right?"

 "And coffee."

 "Ok. Coffee and milk, no sugar."

What I enjoy about this kind of sit-com dialogue is that it’s exactly the kind of dialogue I might have in, say, Portugal or Italy, except that over there I’m trying to communicate in the language of the server whereas here the server is trying to communicate in the language of the customer. Witnessing this type of dialogue repeated over and over with customers at the DnD I’m impressed by how patient both the server and the customer are in getting things right.