Thin Air

Bitterly cold these days. Yesterday, arrived in Los Alamos earlier than normal, took shelter in Starbucks: short bold and a blueberry scone. Same old faces, sipping, mumbling, gazing at their laptops, waiting for their appointed hour.
The windows are steamed up like in an olde English Cayff (café?Olé!). Missing: grease, in its gaseous form, hanging thickly in the air. Thick chipped and stained china. Mixed Grill with the bubbly bacon still squirming from brutal treatment on the frying pan, pork and lamb chops glistening, livers and kidneys lurking deeply within beds of dark brown onions, very deeply baked beans slowly subsiding over what was once crisp, black toast. 
To be fair, the air was not thick with just grease; there was, in the good old days, smoke from cigarettes, distant wafts of marmite being smeared, steam rising from life-restoring PG tips and billowing from the yawning gizzards of the clientele.
You see, here below: the "steam" is not running down the glass, its not even steam, it is delicate high altitude frosting, the air is thin, the gentlemen at the tables are not stevedores or dustbin-men but refined types from the atom bomb factory, no doubt.