Last time I met up with Rich and Maija, we talked about swapping lives. Cobblestones for Central Park; herring for hot dogs. This time, we talked about the economic crisis. About inflation rates, accountability. How the entire staff of the major newspaper in Latvia up and quit because of questionable practices of the owners. How friends live paycheck to paycheck and who knows what will happen next?

With the bad comes the good. The arts spaces that have popped up thanks to cheap rents, the second-hand bookstores and art collectives in old warehouses. Melnais Knābis — The Black Beak Barbershop and Reading Room — and Pērle — bar/used clothing shop/art space/exercise equipment supplier. Places that could never exist the way the bubble swelled a few years back.

We dissected both sides of the coin. Wondered which would fall heavier.

I joked that I would write about our conversation, about how I subconsciously foisted food upon them and joked with the waitress about starving children in Latvia as she carted away the last bite of a biscuit. I didn't think I would write about it, until I came home and saw that a catalog had arrived in the mail, a catalog filled with magnets that look like precious stones, little rubber thumb sleeves for taking dishes out of microwaves, special towel mitts made for drying the paws of one's pets. A doorstop that does double-duty as a putting practice hole. And, as if it couldn't be more obvious: a fake to-go coffee cup made of porcelain and silicone.

The things we think we need.

Immediately the minimalism of a Latvian summer house floods my mind: blankets and a mattress, a platter, a long-handled scythe for mowing grass, wooden chairs, a paring knife, and a bucket. A window flung open to the breeze racing across a field of dandelions.

And it made me think about what it means to get by. What comfort means. I'm certainly oversimplifying the issue. Or overcomplicating it with imagery and — here we go again — allegory. What we were really talking about, the lives of people living day-to-day and paycheck-to-paycheck both here and in Riga, can't be simplified into a blog post written late on a Monday night. But sometimes the thoughts come without ration.

The restaurant we dined in had a woodpile by the front door, used to feed the stove that gave my ribs their smokey flavor. Rich pointed to the woodpile, and said "just like our old apartment."

Flavor, or survival, I think. Two sides to the coin: flavor or survival.