Skip to main content

The Café

 While on a recent trip to the Mid-West
to be with family for Margaret's funeral,
I had time, before returning the rental car, to stop at the Nokomis Beach Coffee Café--which no one calls the Nokomis Beach Coffee Café.  It is just "The Café", at the corner of 28th Avenue and 50th Street, in south Minneapolis, a block or two east of Lake Nokomis.  It is one of the great places on earth.

Because it was late on a Sunday morning, I did not recognize a single person at the Café.  No matter!  It is there that Dennis and Mary have managed a little corner of the world so that people are welcome and can meet each other.  It is there that Mari and I have met some of the best people we know.

We do not have such a café in Tucson.  I am sure there are some, but the coincidence of location and life has not brought us to them as The Café in south Minneapolis did, or as earlier cafés did in Decorah, Iowa.  Chief among them all, in our experience, was the Café Deluxe in Decorah--now having become something else.  Magpies is where The Cousins met, and where we ate together.  But in the story of our personal pleasures, it is very hard to imagine a better place than morning coffee with friends at--let me be formal--The Nokomis Beach Coffee Café.

Nah.  The Café!

Comments

Post a Comment

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
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Not Noticed Among Friends

"If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times:  don't exaggerate!" That isn't what this post is about, except that is has to do with the way we use language, or how language reveals how we think.  What has been intriguing me lately is the growing habit of saying everything twice, or repeating the same idea with different words.  For example:  "When the barrage comes, it comes in bunches."  I rather imagine.  A barrage of one is such a lonely thing, by itself. Here is a list of recent examples: "for each respective team" "both teams have only one timeout, each" "there is this sort of, like. . ." "retweet it out" "but lying about the same, exact. . ." "then elevate up" "He's very good at parceing these arguments apart" "and lied, over and over and over again" And then there are just curiosities: "A man who, everything he touches, turns to g...
Post a Comment
Read more