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

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog