Life in a Coffee Shop

Nine years ago, we packed our lives together and drove from Tucson to St. Paul, where Mari's new job was waiting. We happened upon a house in South Minneapolis, across the Mississippi.

We found the coffee shop almost immediately. We have been there ever since. We moved from that first house here in the Cities, but we start almost every day at that coffee shop.

For thirty years, at a college in Iowa, we stopped for coffee before going to the office. Not finding Mari at her office one morning, I heard from Per in Norway that she had gone back to the coffee shop. It was not an internet cafe. It is in internet world.

Ours is a coffee shop world. I asked Dale and John and Tom where to vote, and we began to talk, and walk around the lake, and belong.

The names change a little, gradually, naturally. We are coffee shop people, not because we agree to meet at the coffee shop. The coffee shop brings us together.

John is there, but Dale is undergoing repairs to his back. Joel comes early to claim the chair that allows him to monitor the intersection traffic and the passers-by. Jeff is big enough to demand attention, but he waits, patiently. Kevin has a new job.

We are not all at the same tables. Tom anchors one or another corner. Madeleine comes early, with a perspective, and leaves to swim at the Y.

I have been nodding, "Good morning!" to someone for years whose name I do not know; still not yet. Maybe never. It isn't necessary. We share a coffee shop.

It is a way to get beyond ourselves, to come together somewhere between best friends and passing strangers. Martin Buber wrote a book titled, "I and Thou", that suggested (in a frantic existential era) that real relationships were something like "God and my soul". That is just an ache. A desire. A yearning. Real relationships are "you and me and them". Real life is a coffee shop meeting; not family, not strangers.

An "I and Thou" life would be awful. Angst every moment. Total truth. No fudging. Absolute, gut-wrenching honesty. No secrets. No relaxation. No acceptance of our normal fallibilities and goofiness.

To be a stranger in a strange land is like being shunned: an outsider, the odd one, cold, anxious.

Life in a coffee shop is life in the middle, both close and loose. It is ease. It is an invitation to smile and say, "Hi!", without betting the farm. It is an openness to surprise.

It is to know there are others like us, and to learn about ourselves.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog