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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.
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