Coffee as An Excuse

On Sunday mornings--almost always--Mari and I stay home, make a pot of really good coffee (just coffee: no sugar, no cream) and read three newspapers. Annic Cat strolls by when whis is not lying where she can see us. She is family, too!

On most other days, we meet friends at the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe. On most days, there are up to a half-dozen of us at a couple of tables nudged together, as we nudge together. We are not really alone. All around, we reliably expect to see other regulars who stop on their way to work; paid or unpaid work. We call across the room.

Saturdays are special. On Saturdays, when the demands for work schedules are easier, we sometimes pull still another table up, and make it more of a party; more of a neighborhood.

But it is the everyday stuff that holds us together. Everydays, we expect to be expected as we come through the door, sometimes with an honest cheer, and sometimes with a dishonest insult.

Why do we come? For a lot of reasons: friendship, habit, a book to borrow or to return. Lots of things. But mostly, we come because we want to talk to really interesting people who have been reading books and newspapers, who have been listening to politicians and evaluating them, who care, and debate, and who think.

We come for ideas. We have things on our minds, and we expect to be contradicted. Our expectations are always met. And our minds are changed, or if not changed, exercised.

None of it would work if the people were not good people. Often, Mari and I remind each other of what we already know: those are some of the best people we know!

A good coffee shop is not necessarily about coffee. A good coffee shop is an opportunity.

Comments

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. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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