high school band at pier 39.

A group of kids played sweet Christmas melodies down by the wharf in San Francisco.  One little boy--the smallest one--played his pipe organ with a hammer and held his floppy booklet of songs with his left hand.  He was the only one in a Santa hat and he hammered his pipes with perfect precision.  Precious Christmas boy!

to applaud december.

A few days ago I overheard a lady say, "the month of December is awful because I want to be able to slow down to take in the meaning of the season, but it's so packed and busy that it always flies by too fast."  And while I can understand her sentiment, I think I'm going to disagree. 

My mother would say I am a glutton for over-commitment and December is most definitely the month of commitments. From Christmas parties to end-of-the-whatever parties, Christmas shopping to making sure you fit in every last tradition (cookie making, "White Christmas" viewing, stringing lights, sending cards, going to various performances, etc.)... there are definitely more than twenty-five things to do.  This means that on top of normal life responsibilities which, in every other month of the year take up every bit of your time each day, you are expected to fit in this whole laundry list of "Christmas things"--and more than one per day! It is indeed a jingle bell marathon.

I've been thinking this week, just about what that lady said.  And that's on top of how often I hear that we've "lost the spirit of Christmas" or that it's "gone commercial."   December-bashing is almost as common as political banter it seems.

But isn't it glorious the way that magic sort of sprinkles down over this month? Isn't there something beautifully comforting about the rich green garlands and ruby red Christmas bows that decorate Nordstrom starting days before Thanksgiving?  I have found myself recently wandering to places like Starbucks and walking around neighborhoods where folks string up gaudy lights and erect blow-up snow men because of what a joy the traditions are for me.

This weekend I ran in a race called the "Mistletoe"--Winston-Salem's half marathon of the last 25 years. I ran beside an older gentleman for a while who informed me that he had run this race every year since it had begun.  he was wearing green tights, stocking shorts and a red t-shirt. He had bells stuffed into his socks that jingled with each step and a ridiculous elf hat.  What fun! And today I bundled up to go to a free performance of Handel's Messiah put on by the local community purely in the spirit of celebration after attending a Young Life Christmas party where there were no less than twenty-seven different casseroles.

I think it comes down to this: Christmas is the season that we celebrate the good news--Jesus has come to be with us!  The words O come, Thou Day Spring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death's dark shadows put to flight.  Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!  are indeed my portion and perhaps it is the reminder of Christmas--Christ's birth--every December that gives me the strength to make it through one more year.  As Madeleine L'Engle said in her poem Into the Darkest Hour, "the stable is our heart."

Some things are ridiculous, like the inflatable six-foot snow globe with the Nativity scene in the yard on the corner of Lindbergh and Country Club, but it is fun to laugh.  And I am thankful for Bing and Nat and their sweet Advent lullabies, for the peppermint coffee drinks and the Home Alone marathons on cheap TV because at the heart of the joy and merriment is the precious keeping of Jesus born in Bethlehem in a sheep pen.  Sweet sweet December, thank you for hosting my heart in this celebration season.

the corner where they lived.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving we drove in toward Pittsburgh from Butler--Mark's home town.  We got as far as the city outskirts to a little place called Mount Lebanon.  Pittsburgh is nestled down in a valley where three rivers meet, the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers.  The hills that rise up, including the famed Mount Washington, surround the city as the porcelain walls of a bathtub. They are dotted with simple homes and nondescript structures--old mills and sheds of sorts.  Pittsburgh's history lies in the steel industry and the city people are hard working.  It is an aged and solemn city. 

The street winds around up Mount Lebanon and passes houses that grow by the block.  The oldest houses, found up on top of the hill, are structurally unique, built with mortar and stone and sharp angled roofs.  The yards are small--every house seems like a well postured gentry standing in his square foot guard post.

As we wound through the neighborhoods, I realized we would pass Mark's folks' first house.  They had met working at the city hospital--a nurse and a young doctor--and fallen in love in the courtly city.  Doc had grown up on Mount Lebanon and when he and Joyce were married, they decided to start back at his beginning.  We drove around corners and sucked in our breath as the Honda squeezed between a row of parked cars and a passing Lexus.  The houses were framed with red and white Christmas lights and in the early dark we passed heedless window people cooking dinner and picking toys up off of the ground. 

Doc pulled up in front of a house on a steep hill.  "This is it," he said, crouching down to look up out of the passenger window. "This is the house I grew up in."  We all looked and I was smiling, and nobody had anything to say.   We drove on down the block and made a few turns, pulling up again in front of another house, smaller, with the front door open and the light shining out onto the lawn.  

Joyce put her hand on Doc's shoulder and said,"there's our first house." Turning to her husband she said,"don't you just miss Mount Lebanon?" 

He chuckled and as he pulled away he glanced back out of the window and exclaimed, "those are my steps!"

"Oh yeah!  Mark, your father built those steps down from the porch to the back.  There weren't steps when we moved in."  She looked back at him and said, "That's your carpentry-- holds up a long time."  She sighed and watched out the window as we drove around down the hill.  

We ate dinner in a quaint restaurant in the neighborhood around the corner from where Joyce used to walk the girls when they were babies and she would wait for Doc to get home from work. "One time," she explained, "I had Lisa in the stroller and I tipped it and she fell right into the gutter.  And then Stef started screaming, 'Mommy! The baby!'  I had to tell her to hush because, of course, all of the rich Mount Lebanon mothers are walking through town and here I am, this young mother, throwing my child in a gutter."  She shook her head and laughed at the memory.  It was sweet to watch her delight in memories that poured forth so heedlessly.

Outside it was windy and cold, but inside it was cozy.  The restaurant had once been someone's home; our reserved table was in an upstairs bedroom of sorts, only the walls had been punched out.  We drank wine and laughed about stories that took place long before Mark and I could be found anywhere but God's ledger.  How thankful I was to put a hand on a place which, to me, was merely a place but to them was the backdrop of an era.

father and son.

There are two partners in the bankruptcy law firm where I work, a father and son.  Mr. Lawyer, Sr. lives vicariously through his younger son who, despite Sr.'s beliefs, is quite a bit less interested in law than his father.  I think he'd much rather teach Russian or Spanish in a University somewhere up north, but he is waiting in line to take over his father's law firm. Dad continues to press son to do things that I believe he himself would rather like to do but thinks he can't because his prime time is over.  One of these ventures is a local civil service position. 

Son lawyer recently ran for this position of Environment Overseer in the elections.  His name was buried in the pile of indiscriminates on the back of the ballot that are hardly ever read and less often marked.  The position is one that less than three percent of the population has any care about and, to top it all off, his was the last name on the list.  

Going into the elections he knew that he was unlikely to win based on voting trends and statistics on how locals know almost nothing about their local elected officials.  However his father spent hours creating visually appealing advertisements for the local papers, meticulously editing slogans, making phone calls and collecting a band of voters to back his son.  Lawyer Jr.'s mother made buttons that she distributed to her friends and placed in buckets on the counter at her nail salon and dry cleaner.  This was a family affair which, by some unfair default, I was dragged into.  Apparently the position of "Receptionist" has no clear limitations or boundaries.  Several hours of my time on the clock in the law office were spent stapling signs to metal stakes to be stuck on corners around town.  One morning of sign construction I was even chastised for placing my staples too far apart.  "Do you think those will really hold up?!" Lawyer Sr. asked me exasperated. Good grief.

He took the day off on November 4th to campaign at the polls on the outskirts of town. The two paralegals and I waited with bated breath for the results.

He didn't win.  I came in a few minutes before nine on Wednesday morning and Rene told me he'd come in second out of four with twenty-seven percent.  The other guy got thirty-four.  I was surprised by my own disappointment.  It was raining too, and cold.

At 9:45 he came into the office, a few minutes before his first appointment of the day.  He was red-faced and his short hair was pressed down matted on the left side.  His collar was flipped up on one side revealing the neck of his striped tie.  

"Morning," I said kindly, quietly.  He responded with a somewhat spastic hello and he seemed flustered.  After getting a brief summary from Rene, he retreated to his office.  Nobody had mentioned the election.  Everyone knew he'd lost.  It was bizarre, a big fat orange elephant in a very small parlor that had, over the past thirty-six hours, grown in importance to everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Lawyer Sr., to whom the election had always been of the highest importance.  

His first appointment was a no-show, so he stayed in his office.  At one point I poked my head into his door to ask him about a file.  As I left I said, "hey, sorry about the election."

"Oh! It's okay! Those things happen, you know?  That's just the way it goes sometimes!"  He exclaimed it like a city hot dog hawker selling lunch to passers-by.  I was startled and nodded, eyes wide.  

A gentleman came in not long after that.  He walked through the door regally, though his clothes were worn out with his rumpled white hair.  He walked right up to the window and said, "Is Mr. Lawyer Jr. in today?"  

His confidence took me back, considering most of the people who come to that window are generally beaten down and pretty miserable.  He asked if he could see Lawyer Jr. and I asked if he had an appointment.

"Oh, no appointment necessary! I just wanted to commend him on the election! It was a good race, commendable." 

I went back to the office and pushed the door open.

"Wil," I said, "an old client of yours is here.  Says he wants to commend you on the election."

He did come out of his office to the window and that old bankrupt businessman shook Wil's hand and told him what a fine job he'd done running for the position and what a fine man he was in this community of Winston-Salem.  And all Wil could say was "thanks" and nod his head.  But when the man walked out the door and Wil walked back to his office, it finally felt like the tension had broken.  Wil even made a joke about having fewer meetings to worry about.  Of course, when his father came in I thought he might just break down into tears.  But I guess there are some things that just have to be left alone.  

off of Pine Valley road, autumn explosion!

some night.

After a long evening they drove back to her apartment in the dark.  These nights were fun because they got to help out with the meetings and see their friends, but they didn't really see much of each other.  A couple times during the night he had come up behind her and touched her to tell her, "here, behind you!"  He'd smile at her across the room in between conversations and she would wink back.  They'd stay late afterwards to help clean up.

"My paycheck is late again," she said as they wound around streets on the residential shortcut that gave them a fifteen-minute catch-up window.  The trees, which were so brilliant by day, looked various shades of gray and black in the cloudy evening.  "Maybe if I was making decent money that wouldn't matter, but I'm not.  Four hundred dollars matters!"

"That's obnoxious," he said.  "What's the hold up?  Did the boss tell you when you'd get it?"

"He said late Thursday. Maybe Friday."  She was annoyed.

When they got to her apartment, he turned off the car and they both got out.  She went before him down the walkway and unlocked the door.  They went inside and he stood in the doorjamb as she put her purse and plastic coffee mug on the island.

"Alright, well I hope you have a great day at work tomorrow," she said as she turned around and stood face-to-face with him.  She hugged him and stood there for a minute.

He wrapped his arms around her back and rested his head on her temple.  She looked out the window into the black nighttime and he, looking at the mirror on the wall across the room, said, "I wish I could get an artist's depiction of this, right now."

"Of what?" she asked.

"My big arms wrapped around your little self, and your beautiful hair.  It's just cute."

She laughed pulling her head back to see his face and kissed his cheek.

"Love you."  He walked away from the door and she quickly lost his silhouette with the kitchen light behind her and the moonless night outside.

Patty Griffin.

Patty Griffin sings from her soul.  You would know it even if she sang in Portuguese because of the way you can hear her guts coming through the sound of her voice.  Her music moves my spirit in a way that no other music ever has.  It is full of her deepest appetites and her simplest stories and to listen is to quench some unidentified hope for sweet, sweet music.

Her songs are honey in this fall season; her strumming is the perfect soundtrack for the rustling leaves and her voice sounds the way the rust treetops turn bronze in the five o'clock hour when the light is most scintillating.  She has wrapped her voice around the essence of autumn.  And like fall, when everything is so beautifully dying so that it can spring up later and begin again, Patty narrates the reality of life--all of its death and living and struggling and breathing.

Fall has a bewitching power over me.  The sky is almost the bluest blue that can be found outside of poetry and the way that the afternoon light pushes through the cracks of the leaves that canopy across the streets makes me forget where I am.  I could live with this forever.  And as I have found myself lately at a loss for words, Ms. Patty's folk songs seem to be the solution.

 

teaching an old dog young tricks.

My boss is a bankruptcy lawyer.  His son, also his partner, refers to his father in a business-like manner calling him "Wen" rather than dad.  It is strange.  I was hired at the firm as a receptionist for the morning hours.  It is a quiet job, answering phones, making copies, smiling at our clients who, I am certain, roll their eyes inwardly when I say, "Have a great day!"  I'm bankrupt, lady. 

The unconventional portion of this job is that I have become the boss's personal typist.  He is from the old school, for lack of a more perfectly suited term, and he prefers to write things out shorthand on a legal pad.  This is ridiculous considering the changing times... also considering that he is writing a novel which will, eventually, have to be entirely typed.  He, however, chooses to remain the same and reject modern commonalities such as voicemail, Microsoft Word and spell checker.  

In my initial interview I felt somewhat sheepish and young and got the distinct feeling of being looked down upon.  However, once my boss realized what a wealth of technological, vocabulary and internet intelligence I was (really not that much, but much more than he), he began to treat me with greater interest.  I was a daily champion at work, a great tutor in modern writing tools.

Kyle, my seventeen-year-old brother, called me from Florida this evening as I was eating dinner.  He was trying to unlock something on the computer which I, once a resident of our household, had set up with a password that he didn't know.  After I told him the key he, in a moment of sheer other-mindedness, asked me how I was doing--a big thing from the subdued child who despises talking on the phone.  And I, on a whim of really wanting to chat with him, took the bait and told him.  

"I am studying for the GRE."

"The what?" he said.

"The GRE.  It's a test to get into graduate school.  I have it on Thursday.  It's kind of like a vamped up SAT.  But there is math, which I am terrible at, so I'm pretty much SOL."

"Maybe I could help you," he said, laughing because of the reference to an expletive as well as the fact that his realm of mathematical knowledge exceeded mine when he was fourteen.  

"Do you have time?" I said, chuckling sheepishly.

"Yeah, I do."  I heard him smile.

We spent the following thirty minutes on the phone.  I'd tell him the practice problem and he'd write it down.  He walked me through the steps of solving for y, and told me the formulas for finding the volume and surface area of a cylinder.  He reminded me that you can't have a negative exponent and that the easy formulas for triangle solving only work for the right triangles which, for my information, have one ninety-degree angle.

I chewed on the end of my pen, scribbling notes down on the yellow legal pad, asking all kinds of questions and, more than once, "Wait, say that again.  I don't understand."  Then he'd go back and try to explain it all over again.

Kyle was totally patient, an excellent and well versed teacher.  At the end as I scanned my notes to make sure I'd asked him all of my questions I heard him snicker on the other end of the phone a thousand miles away.

"You know," he said, "I charge ten bucks an hour for tutoring."

Laughing, I said, "You can collect from mom and dad.  Tell them it's part of my continuing education."

Maybe, in continuing education, instructors come from behind, like cars coming up to pass in your blind spot, and surprise you with insight you never could've learned from an elder.

Thanks, Kyle :)  

flag football.

The guys were all sitting on the wood beam at the edge of the parking lot facing the field when we pulled up.  I got out of the car in jeans and flip flops and grabbed a brown fleece zip-up out of the back seat.  

Drew stood up.  "I can't believe y'all come out here to these games," he said, shoving his sandals into a bag. 

I smiled. "Of course we come to these games.  This is the only football I really care about!"  

He shook his head and laughed.  "Y'all are some kinda fans, that's for sure."

Tuesday is the new Monday... in Winston-Salem, anyway.  Flag football; it is admittedly a little uncouth and refs are clearly not overly concerned with accuracy, and the city could really afford to spring for some new light bulbs for past-sunset games, but it is simple and organic and, in my opinion, the best kind of football there is.

The games last an hour.  They start sometime between 6:30 and 8:30 depending on your slot.  Fall comes a little later in North Carolina, but by now it gets pretty chilly when the sun goes down and it feels right to watch a game with hands in pockets of jackets and jeans.  

Some of the teams take it pretty seriously.  They've got jerseys and plenty of subs.  I think they practice.  Last years' champs hit the field looking like the Kansas Jayhawks.  My cynical side wants to make fun of the uniforms, but they are are good at football so I hold my tongue. 

Freakway, the team to which I claim allegiance, has jerseys too.  Matt, a bartender at Firebirds restaurant, made them one Sunday afternoon.  White Hanes brand t-shirts printed on with Sharpie with the team name on the front.  The store didn't have enough adult sizes when he bought them so a few of the guys wear a child large.  Kyle's hit at midriff the first week.  They've since remedied the situation... it was ugly.  

They all get there fifteen minutes before the game and line up by the field, swapping Birkenstocks for football cleats, stretching and warming up.  They throw around a couple of old footballs and swear off the stupid mistakes of previous games.  Brad blows off pre-game steam and Kyle ties up his renegade hair with an elastic

 head band.  

When the referee puts his hand up, Mark and the opposing captain meet in the middle of the field.  They shake hands to begin and then, as if the engine was suddenly started, they get serious and play football.

Kyle rushes through the line to sack the quarterback who's hopping back and forth looking for a wingman, dodging under and around the linemen.  Josh and some of the others chase down the receivers, trailing flags and flying for the interception.  Somehow Blake usually appears out of nowhere to snag a flag off the shorts of the guy who has caught the ball not three seconds beforehand.  Brad, who played football in college, drives into every play with such ferocity I think he might actually break his neck when he hits the ground and it never ceases to amaze me when he stands up again.  Mark is the quarterback.  He's got a rocket arm and he dodges defensive linemen like a mig.  Blake once said, "Mark runs as fast backwards as he does forward!"  I think he's right.  And when Mark launches the football it spirals down the field and connects perfectly to Josh's hands, or Kyle's, as if they have an invisible avenue between them.  And this is not to mention the way that somehow Seth seems to find a way up into the middle of opposition passes and snatch the ball from out of the air between them or the way that Justin comes up from underneath to catch passes that appeared to be going nowhere.  

For the first time I actually love football.  And it's not the sport.  Football has never really captivated me.  But it's the way that this game on Tuesday nights affords the guys such a good old time. It feels like for an hour once a week they can all forget about their jobs and quit worrying about the economy.  They can leave futures and girlfriends and wives and kids and just play.  They are fifteen again and the only thing that matters is the end zone.

southbound sunday afternoon.

 On the western side along the highway in the mountains of Virginia the trees are a symphony of orange and pomegranate.  They are booming, deafening even, and the harmony hazes my eyes and my arm hair stands on end.  Inside the car, I press power on the dash to turn off the radio.  It's quiet except for the engine and the reverberating harmonies of the autumn mountainscape. The sun keeps dumping its heated rays in through my window.  My shoulders are warm but my unclad toes are translucent with cold.  It is fall, the season of prime age.

While I drive, you pull the lever on the right side of the seat and push your seat back to a slight recline.  You cover your eyes with your baseball cap, the one that is shredded because you wore it so many years in a row; it turned from navy to gray before I even met you.  Your slightly tan arms are crossed and, though you don't make a sound, I know you are sleeping because you are mostly still.  When you twitch it makes me laugh.  

In time I forget that you are a passenger and send up open-eyed prayers on your behalf as if you were somewhere else, far away from me.  I hum instrumental songs and turn my cell phone to silent to guiltlessly escape in the mountains.  

middle school and san francisco.

"Did you know that the New York City water system thing is like two hundred years old?" Tess asked me.  

"No way," I said. 

"Yeah, and nobody has even seen it or touched it since it was first built."

I laughed, "I doubt that's true."

"Well," she said, recovering, "well they have never stopped the water, I mean.  I was watching the History channel and they were saying that they're afraid that if they stop it to check it, they won't be able to start it again.  And all of the water for the entire city is in this old water system underground."

I believed her.  She was totally enamored by this water system.  In fact, she even seemed afraid for the good of New Yorkers, that this decrepit rusted water system would give way and leave everyone thirsty and desperate for a shower.  I wasn't as interested in the potential water cessation as I was in her genuine interest in the problem.  When I said then that I thought it'd be fun to live in the Big Apple for a few years, she was adamantly opposed because of the possibility that I'd run out of water.  This seemed to me like such a far-off adult problem, yet eleven year old Tess was confounded.

We drove along the parkway for a few minutes listening to her choice radio station, which is typical.  She tends to scan the radio and sing along, generally content in casual conversation and singing along.  After a while she looked at me and, with the resolute chin dig, said, "If I was going to live in a city, it would have to be San Francisco.  I mean, not forever, but for some time."  She had been thinking about this.  "Some people don't like how it's foggy.  But you know it's just cause it's by the Bay.  I think it's elegant."  

I nodded, watching the road, electing to wait and listen rather than chime in.

"I love the cable cars," she bounced up from the seat and stuck her hands underneath of her to land, an effort to somehow harness a bit of her fizzing excitement.  She spoke emphatically, but it wasn't enough.  She wanted me to understand the regal eminence of San Francisco.  "That is definitely my favorite part--the cable cars.  But make sure, when you go, to pack warm stuff because it's cold there.  I mean, we were there in the middle of August and it was so cold."  She paused and looked out the window.  "But it doesn't matter that it's cold.  San Francisco is the best place on earth.

"You can just go and eat chinese whenever you want right in Chinatown.  And there is this Mediterranean place... oh my gosh it is so good."  She emphasized the words with her inflection and her sprawled fingers.  

"There is a Mediterranean place in Chinatown?" I asked, smiling a little bit.

"No!" she exclaimed, appalled by my ignorance and distressed for me to understand.  Looking out the window seemed to bring her back to earth a bit and she said softly, "it would be perfect to be an artist in San Francisco."  She looked at me with crystal eyes and said, in complete sincerity, "Have you ever heard the song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco?"

I nodded.

"That song explains it perfectly."  

"Tess," I laughed, "I have never seen you so passionate about anything."

She didn't say anything and I knew she was dreaming of her city esteemed.  We turned onto the street where I would drop her off at girl scouts.  When we got to the front of the church she opened the door and said, with stoic conviction, "Go to San Francisco.  Do it."  Then she got out of the car and ran inside.

the incredible shrinking house.

When I was young, during the pre-elementary school years that everyone sort of vaguely remembers in a fuzzy dream, we lived in a house on Hillside Drive.  It was a white cape cod with a gray slated roof that angled sharply from a point in the center of the cubic house down to the top of the first floor.  Our street ran right behind the hospital where, once a year, they would hold the most glamorous fair with Aladdin's carpet slide and cotton candy machines.  My sister and I shared a room on the second story and my parents had the other across the hall.  There was a bathroom up there too, but I can't remember now the color of the wall paper.

I had won a contest, a drawing I think, at the dentist office.  The prize was a colossal stuffed dinosaur that was roughly five inches taller than I.  Owing to the fact that my favorite movie of all time (at that point) was Puff the Magic Dragon, it was quite possibly the greatest day of my life when I won.  They brought me into the office, put one of those floppy pointed princess hats on my head, and took portraits of me and my new guardian.  Then I took him home and dragged him around our castle of a house every day.  

Puff sat underneath the window in our room that looked out over the backyard.  There was an enormous tree reaching toward the window with grabbing hands that would moan and shiver in the wind.  It was the kind of tree that is incredibly enticing in daylight, yet completely terrifying during the night.  My dragon was the mystical keeper of our bedroom and then, when I got tired, my transportable bed of sorts.

When we moved away from West Chester I cried for months in desperation for the old house with the towering pointed roof, the grandfather trees and the window that was so high up above the ground.  Our new house was one story and seemed so diminutive to me then.  "Ginny," my dad would say softly to me, patiently, brushing my unruly hair away from my wet cheeks, "that house was much smaller than this house.  It just seemed bigger because it was tall."  I didn't buy it.  

In time I got used to the new house and I would lean up against Puff watching television in the basement.  He began shrinking, as I recall.  

Eventually we went back to visit the old house on Hillside Drive.  A blind man with a mean old seeing eye dog had purchased the home from us. He had torn down the white picket fence my father had put up and painted one summer as a gift to my mom and erected a five-foot chain-link replacement.  He filled my mom's flower beds with plastic toys for his son.  The brick porch was crumbling and the house seemed slightly less white and more grayish.  It was drizzling, as I recall, and I'm not good with rain, slightly seasonally affective.  

I was shocked.  "It looks so puny," I said to my parents with a kind of unimpressed grimace. We sat in the car with the doors closed, staring out the windows.  "It seemed so much bigger before."

"You were a lot smaller," my dad said.

"I just can't believe it!" I exclaimed. "I thought it was so enormous." I was thirteen now.  

"It was, to you," my mother said.

good old boys.

When I pulled up to the garage at eight thirty in the morning and the sun was in its foggy and blinding morning glory, I was sweaty from a run and in much need of some coffee.  I had to get some new tires put on my car.  Mark and I had gotten a flat tire in the middle of the West Virginia mountains which then caused me to discover that three of my four tires were all but stripped.  Par a recommendation of the Rudnicke's, I headed over to Mock Tire, a flat sprawled building with tires all stacked around the garage doors and black and white tiled floor in the office.  The place was buzzing with men, some in blue mechanic suits and some in loafers and short-sleeved Oxfords.  A few women lingered around the door.  

I was admittedly a bit awkward walking in.  I always get nervous going into a car place because I feel totally out of my element, primarily because I'm a female.  Secondly because I always end up divulging my ignorance about cars when they ask me questions like, 'when's the last time you got your filters changed?' or 'what kind of engine have you?' or 'what size tires do you need?' I don't know.  

However, this time it was different.  There were four men behind the counter; two were older gentlemen wearing starched white collared shirts and khakis.  They both had white hair combed back and one of them had a mustache.  They were just gentlemen, well-postured and southern and they reminded me of my grandfather.  Another man who was a bit younger and wore a mechanic suit helped me figure out what I would need, taking care to explain to me what type of tires I'd be getting and why I really should get the cheapest ones because they were just as good as the $80 ones, never once making me feel that I should already have mastered the tire market.  The fourth gentleman bore a striking resemblance to Robert Redford and his voice had the calm rubbing sound of sandpaper. Wholly relieved, I sat down to wait.

I waited for about forty minutes, watching them work on my car from the window.  A handful of of older gentleman came in and lingered around the office, talking candidly and laughing with the managers of the store.  All salty and weathered, they discussed the economy and the seasons and asked about each other's wives.  "I don't know a thing you're qualified to do," joked one squat gentleman to his friend the manager.  Most of the visitors didn't have a car needing work, they just came to pass the morning, respectable members of an established city club. It occurred to me, watching the gentlemen, that they were in no hurry.  The reputable managers with their clean shaven faces, the mechanics with their relaxed and efficient working hands and the men who dropped by Mock Tire to pay a visit were happy in their well-fitted matrix of friendship and years and a doubtless myriad of histories.  Glad to shoot the breeze, they just easily took the morning like they always have, I suppose.

water color love.

I have this friend.  She's the kind of friend that will go out for Mexican food on a Wednesday night with you even though maybe Mexican food gives her a stomach ache every time she eats it.  But if you say, "Hey, want to go grab some fajitas?" she'll say yes without hesitation because she knows you love Mexican and she wants you to love your dinner.  And a few months later you'll receive a package in the mail with a bottle of Jose's hot tamale sauce and a little note that says how you made eating Mexican worth it.  She's that kind of friend.

Sometimes I feel sort of like a thief because I can't believe that somehow I have the privilege of such a close and consistent friendship with someone who is so very loving.  She has this radar, whose upkeep I am confident takes a lot of work and deliberateness, that hones in on people's individual needs and deficits, and then pours love in, like concrete in a cracked sidewalk.  And she does it across the board! For so many people, she just tip-toes around soundlessly painting the world with this brilliant water color love.   

I had the opportunity to live with her for four wonderfully unconventional and foreign months.  We travelled and explored and discovered so much in those months, about places and people, ourselves and one another.  We grew together like snaking vines on a trellis, full of all of the brilliant red wildflowers and all of the thorns, and when we returned to our normal lives we couldn't really ever quite unwind.  In fact I don't know that we could have figured out whose thorns were whose.  About a month into our residence together, she gave me a gift disguised as a challenge.  She challenged me to write a book and in some dauntless whim, I said okay.  Well I wrote that book over the next three months-- an entire book.  And when I finished, she walked with me to the local print shop and we printed it with the last of our money right before Christmas.  We hole punched the pages and cut them to fit into a European sized binder.  We spent the entire day making frozen trips to the print shop on foot a few days before Christmas. And you know, I didn't realize how much I needed to accomplish that book, but she did because that's the kind of friend she is.  

And it's ever making me want to be that kind of friend.

big and small.

My nephew was born last week, Jonathan Turner.  His entry into the world was anticipated by a pretty good crowd and even his three-year-old cousin was there at nearly midnight to welcome him.  My sister, who delivered this child with Audrey Hepburn-like grace and class, didn't even break a sweat and when it was all over, still had her mascara on.  

I didn't anticipate the melting phenomenon.  I've never been much of a "baby person," which is a phrase I often hear people say who are a bit cynical and probably a bit nervous, to be honest.  But then I saw him, from behind the plexi-glass window, being washed by a nurse.  She scrubbed his little red bottom and I could see his little face all screwed up in a grimace.  Our whole family, and my sister's in-laws and friends, we all watched.  And do you know what I did?  I sat down on the floor with my chin on the window sill and started crying.  I was the only one! Everyone else is cooing at baby Jonathan, laughing and saying how mad he must be to be so cold and wet and naked.  I pressed my face up against the bottom of the glass to hide my tears from everyone.  I turned into mush, smashed-up with butter and milk mashed-potato face.  That was me.

When my sister asked me to hold him the next morning, the only thing I could concentrate on was not dropping him, hearkening back to memories of the first day we had our Golden Retriever puppy, Jake, in the house and I dropped him from standing onto the wood floor in the kitchen... on his head.  I think I ran into my room and cried.  Are you sensing a reactionary pattern?  I have always hated the fact that I cry when I'm overwhelmed with any emotion because it makes me feel so--ridiculous.  But it's good, I suppose, to be reminded of my own mediocrity.  It causes me to anticipate with eagerness the ways I will one day express the emotion I intend with creativity and grace in heaven.  Anyway, when Hannah handed me her son, I awkwardly cradled him in my arms and said a prayer as she passed him off to me.  I may have been sweating.  

But then I sat back in the chair and nestled the little guy up in the crook of my elbow.  He squirmed around in his swaddled cloths and I called him "Wormy" and stared at his small button nose and his eyes half-opened.  And after some time, when the room was quiet and my sister was dozing off in the hospital bed, I did the only thing I knew how to.  I began to sing, soft and sweet.  He stopped fidgeting and went loosely still.  I think the words of the old Beatles song, "Blackbird," drifted into his infant ears and settled in a little cranny in his memory.  I think we bonded.  

My favorite neighbor and almost-niece, Hannah, waiting for Uncle Mark and Ginny to arrive for dinner.

median jig.

I am in this transitional place in my life where I can't dig my heels in because I know that in seven and a half months I will be, in many ways, uprooted and re-planted.  That is a very violent way of explaining getting married, but I can't imagine a much greater jolt than suddenly compounding your own life, which has always been yours independently, with someone else's.  Except perhaps birthing a baby, which I am nowhere near.  So in this middle earth, this no-man's-land, I am trying to hold out and juggle the unknowns.

For instance, insurance.  I realize that it is completely necessary to have insurance.  What if I had to have my appendix taken out and didn't have health coverage.  I'd be something like twenty-thousand dollars in the hole.  But my parents' plan will let me be a leech for a few more months and then I get married so shortly after that.  But what if, by some outside chance, my appendix, which has been faithful to me for twenty-two years, decides to rupture in that small window of lawless insurance un-coverage?  I'm out of luck.  But for a person who trembles at financial details, I feel sort of pre-dominated by the whole thing.  This is pathetic, I realize, and I need to grow up and stop being such a baby.  So what do I do?  Call my dad of course, like I used to do in fifth grade when I'd lay awake at a sleepover birthday party and finally decide I couldn't hack it, I had to go home.

What is more, I live in a new town with a new family in a new basement apartment where there are new behemoth insects I've never seen before.  I need a new job and new friends and my new church is starting a new series for the new school year.  I am familiar with little more than my fiance, Mark, and the fifteen-year-old over sized chair and ottoman I grew up watching TV in which my parents donated to the our-daughter-owns-no-more-than-what-fits-in-her-Civic fund.

Therefore, because of this sort of rootlessness, I feel like a hobo with a pillow case holding all of my worldly possessions slung over my left shoulder walking down the median of a busy street.  Zoom, oh my! That car just about clipped me!  

The appealing thing about hobos, though, is that they are constantly on the move, always seeing new things and new people, discovering more beautiful things in a lifetime than people who are, perhaps, boxed-up and stamped, ever get to see.  So despite my itch to be at home, familiar with my neighbors and my schedule, I am pleased to find that this kind of adventure is probably actually very life-giving.  What is more, I am finding that I feel at home where Mark is, where my journal and books are, where my Bible is...and that is quite enough.

bridal mart.

I may not have mentioned yet the fact that I am engaged to be married on May 2nd of 2009. As of today that is only eight months away and as the date approaches two things happen: I get a little more nervous about pulling off all the details and little more excited to be married to this man that I love.  I've come around to the realization that it's frivolous to worry about the day--to be honest my only real concern is that there is red wine and if the flowers clash with the tablecloths no one, not even my Logistical Queen mother, will care.  

Of all of the details, I have been able to relax over all but one. I had been losing sleep over the dress. Not being an overly fashion-savvy person to begin with, the prospect of deciding upon the single most important dress I will ever don was costing me hours of sleep at night.  This is a jittery prospective nervousness that begins with driving to a bridal boutique and walking through the door.  All of the fitting and measuring and in-out-in-out of pants and gowns... and then you throw in the lady who insists that you try it with a veil "just to see how it looks"--the whole thing gives me a stitch in my side just to think of it.

I had finally sucked it up one morning and, like the prepped firing squad with feet planted, I informed my sister that TODAY would I venture into the badlands of bridal stores.  We went, I tried on dozens, felt vaguely sympathetic to a lab rat who's been poked and hung up by his tail, and had melted down to a point of exhaustion and hunger.  But in the end we had found a perfect dress. Perfect hue, perfect design, lovely style, incredible detail. Problem: $2,600.  Not okay.

After this experience and some serious (yet slightly irrational) consideration, I decided that I could not bring myself to spend that kind of cash on a one-time-wear, especially considering that that sum of money is more than many people have to support a family for a year in many places across the globe. I'm not a super-hero-Ginny-saint-philanthropy, but that was over the top.

A friend suggested to me that there is a place near where I live in Burlington, North Carolina called Bridal Mart.  Does the name cause you to raise your brow? It should.  This place is renowned for the fact that it carries top-notch designer dresses for incredibly discounted prices, yet it has a sort of TJ Maxx meets Costco ambiance.  When I walked in I was shell-shocked by the quantity of dresses that were squished in among about twenty-five aisles of dresses.  If there was a system, I'm not sure what it would have been.  My sister, who happens to be precisely nine months pregnant, bravely charged on that store like two-ton linebacker while my mom disappeared behind some white lace and chiffon and we went to town. I sort of stood and blinked with my mouth slightly open.  

This searching process, though overwhelming and completely reckless, went smoothly and each of us found a few dresses that could work.  My sister, hoping to move the baby along a little, volunteered to be the dress-hauler and she informed me that I was in "number 8." Assuming this meant dressing room (with a door and a bench) number 8, I gathered a few more gowns and ventured to the fitting rooms.

Or should I say fitting room.   That's right.  Bridal Mart does not have fitting rooms for brides to try on gowns. Bridal Mart has one solitary fitting room with about twenty numbered pegs stuck into the walls upon which dresses are to be hung.  Hannah meant for me to be PEG 8.  I realize that I may be unreasonable to feel entitled to my own room so, to be a good sport, I sucked up my modesty and began to try on dresses dutifully beside my peg.  Granted, I was trying dresses on over shorts as not to throw all reserve to the wind, but still rising to the group-fashion-show occasion.  

Deep in my own little I-have-to-get-this-thing-hooked-on-but-it's-too-damn-tight world, I finally looked up to see not one but two very curvaceous women, clad in not a scrap of fabric besides some anti-panties, pulling on dresses like somebody unpeeling a banana. Prancing all around their pegs two and four, these soul sisters were laughing and having a good old time in the dressing room at Bridal Mart.  I hope I didn't gawk, though the minutes are sort of fuzzy with shock so I can't be sure. I'll just say that I have never in my life felt so nondescript. 

That dressing room, such an incredible sampling of humanity! Suzie-ponytail with her mother telling her how pristine and perfect she is and Gloomy Gladys who thought that there couldn't possibly be a dress for her within the walls of Bridal Mart (much like whining that there isn't a good spot to lay on the beach of Hawaii).  And then Nancy and Nora Nudey all footloose and free--ludicrous yet laughable.

My assessment of the super store for North Carolina brides?  A+.  Not only because it delivered and relieved me of the single wedding detail that was costing me my sleep, but because it welcomes raw female humanity with a big old smile and some great wide open arms. 

Awareness.

There is this book that I've been reading for almost a year now--it is a sort of compilation of excerpts from theological and spiritual books written by old thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, men who really understood the meaning of things--this is really rich material.  And this little supplemental book kind of takes a theme each week and delves into it with all of these varying views and perspectives and references to the Bible that have to do with that particular subject.  After a year you'd think I would be tired of this old brown book that my dad handed down to me, but I'm not.  And, in fact, as the year comes to an end I think I'm actually nervous for this book to conclude because it has helped me to take such giant steps forward these past months.  And then I talk to my dad and he tells me that he read that book over and over again for about twenty years. I can see why.

Anyway, this week the subject of the book is "Awareness" and it is all about how God can be found in thousands of places--everywhere, really--if only we would be aware of his surrounding presence in the plain things.  I stared out the window thinking about this for a while this morning, considering the things I don't actually appreciate.  I mean actively.  For instance, I have a job!  I mean, that seems stupid, but really.  I have a job that helps me to pay for the things that I need.  Some people don't have the luxury of a job.  And the sun, for instance. It's sunny most days where I live.  When it's grey I appreciate the sun, but when it's sunny I don't. On grey days I am a gremlin. I can't keep my eyes open, I'm grouchy and crampy and generally reclusive.  But on sunny days I'm a happy and curly and creative.  It's amazing what the sun does for my soul, but I don't thank God for the sun when it's sunny. (As I write this, I am amazed by my own ignorance).

So I had this whole haze of thoughts on awareness today when I was sitting behind the counter at the coffee shop (it was my last day working there) and this first-class character walks in.  Most of the people that come in the shop are regulars, but not this man.  He walks in, sort of swaggers, and practically hits his head on the top of the door jamb because he is so tall. He has this kind of lumberjack look about him but he's got a Hawaiian shirt rather than flannel plaid.  He stops in front of the pastry case and I tell him the old "everything is locally baked" line, but I kind of whisper it because he is so big and so quiet.  And he nods at me, slowly lifting up his eyelids enough to show me the twinkle in his eye, telling me that I don't really have to say anything.  He's just going to decide in his own sweet time.  So I just stand there sort of staring at this incredibly substantial man whose head is bald and shining with the reflection from the overhead bulbs.  His woolly mustache is kind of reddish and his arms are just huge.  And it occurs to me now as I write that it is entirely possible I remember this man as bigger than he really was, but I was just so enamored by him in all of his sixty-two-year-old glory.  

So he finally decides on this pastry, a big cinnamon and sugar and walnut frosted thing that is appropriately named "Bear Claw."  Of course he wants the bear claw.  And then I ask him if he wants something to drink.  And of course he does.  I assume it'll be a black coffee, but it isn't.  He orders a milk.  This Goliath of a man orders a big cup of whole milk.  But he wants ice. And he wants a straw.  

It just struck me so funny, this enormous man drinking a big cup of milk with ice through a straw while he eats this super sweet and delicious pastry that's locally baked.  He sits there for thirty minutes eating and slurping away at his milk.  I mean, my brother and I used to drink iced milk when we were about three and a half feet tall.  After furtively watching him for a while and secretly stealing a picture on my cell phone camera, I decide that it is perfect.  It is absolutely appropriate for him to be drinking milk and eating a delightful pastry at 10:30 in the morning when everyone else is either at work or at school.  So bafflingly appropriate.  And then it occurs to me that perhaps I am experiencing a taste of awareness impetuous.  I could get used to living like this-

bugs.

I have a completely irrational aversion to insects.  Primarily I fear them, despite my rational intelligent understanding of my relative size.  But though I can talk myself out of this anxiety as long as the day, the second a bee swoops within three feet of me, I panic and hop around, spurting intelligible syllables from the mouth.  It's pathetic.

Nagging bugs are different from perilous bugs.  Gnats, flies, ants and mosquitos fall into the "nagging bug" category.  

In honor of nagging bug season, I'll publish a poem I wrote in July.

Mug air

sitting stagnant

ly on my beading skin

dotting salty dew

drops one irksome black fly

will not seem to stay

away from me, 

fly!

Tapping my foot to

determinably pay

not any attention

to the tip-toeing

winged heckler.

This tapping toe

is making me

hot.

7/19

well fed and satisfied.

In February I was finishing up my senior year of college.  I drove down south to North Carolina to visit my sister, a high school Spanish teacher, and her husband for a long weekend and she surprised me with some tremendous news.

We drove out to pick up my brother-in-law from work and on the drive there I asked her how she'd been feeling.

"Eh, alright.  I haven't been sleeping well."

"Stressed at school?" I asked nonchalantly, examining the cracks in my fingernails as she made a left turn.

"No.  I'm pregnant."

There is no way to describe the emotion that coursed through me at that moment, followed by the insatiable thirst I suddenly had for words that would not flow.  I don't remember really, but I know I must have gaped and stammered at her like a middle school boy when he first tries to give a book report to his English class.  After a funnel of emotions, some screeching and some physical bursts from my arms and legs, we were at her husband's office and I think I finally cried.  We hugged for a while and I made all kinds of ridiculous claims about the wonderful things I would teach this niece or nephew. My sister, two years older than me, always the pioneer into things unknown to us, was the mother of her precious unnamed unborn child.  I was overwhelmed.

Over the course of the next months, I neared graduation and, unsure of my life's destination, decided to move down to North Carolina to live with my sister for the summer--our last hurrah as kind-of-kids, pre-real-adulthood.  We decided that, for some reason, bearing a child ushers you into true adulthood, whereas college graduation merely ushers you out of the season of perpetual and constant "hanging out."  

On May 2nd I graduated, and on May 3rd my family ate an enormous brunch at the hippie co-op diner in my college town, packed up a truck and my Honda Civic, and moved me four hours south to North Cackalacky.  

Now it is nearing the end of August. My sister's baby is due September 6 and she has begun to resemble a moving truck--a car's width from the back, but there's that huge nose that juts out the front and renders the driver blind to anything within twenty-five feet of it's front wheels.  She ain't makin' it to nine months, sister.  

And as she prepares to embark on this journey of motherhood so promptly, I know that it is time for me to shape up and ship out.  The time is also right for me in the season that I am in to move to the city where my fiance lives, to the place where I wanted to live from the beginning.  But I feel sort of drenched in homesickness for my sister already because I will mourn her daily sweet company so deeply.  

I sat on the back porch just the other day, thinking about these past four months and the unexpected opportunity we have had as sisters to live together again after six years of living so far apart. It occurred to me that I have a sort of stair-step view of events and circumstances, a belief that most things and events in our lives are stepping stones to the next balcony, to the next open door through which we are beckoned to walk and discover an entirely different and somehow more wide open room.  However I realized that this summer, these months of living with my born best friend, was a place without an exit door.  It was simply a back porch under a shady oak tree, a place where we could sit and enjoy the beauty of the day without having to move on.  Perhaps I will learn something in the future that I have not yet seen, but I believe that the reason for my living with my sister this summer was not to prepare for some other thing or to move me forward or to challenge me through growing pains to maturity, though I'm sure we have both grown.  This summer was simply a gift of time and relational richness with a woman who has always loved me and whom I will always love. 

I will remember this summer with my sister for our visits to the farmer's market and our mornings with coffee and our Bibles, our trips to the gym and the first time that I saw her baby roll around inside her belly making rolling waves on her swollen abdomen.  I'll remember how she made molasses cookies so the house would smell like it did when we were kids and how she would come and crawl into my bed with me when her husband was away on overnight business trips.  I'll remember how sweetly she smiled while folding her unborn baby's clothes when she first washed them with anti-allergenic detergent, our frequent trips to TCBY for soft serve frozen yogurt and how she would remind me to bring my lactaid pill.  I'll remember sharing small sips of red wine that she pined for, the way that she sniffled every morning because of year-round allergies and the way that she made that concentrated face when she painted water color fish for the nursery, the way that her stomach protruded from her t-shirt when she painted the living room.  

I will remember and count myself rich for the simple summer I got to spend with my big sister.

discount stuff.

There is a large consignment boutique around the corner from the coffee shop where I work that sells all kinds of high-end discount home furnishings. From the name, you'd expect the owner to be a high-energy middle-aged woman that's all airbrushed with liquid foundation and bright red lip liner.  I did think that, I confess, until one day early this summer when the owner stepped into my own place of employment to order a cappuccino.  

I really thought he was a bit of a tool at first when he elbowed up on the counter and affectionately referred to my boss as "darling" with a wink.  But I was wrong and by the time he had ordered his drink and paid for it, leaving a buck in the tip jar, he'd won my heart.  He is a five-foot-four beach-bum has-been.  His voice is a combination of Marty McFly and Arnold Schwarzeneger with a New York accent and he can hardly blink without flirting but his heart is solid gold and he's a great tipper.  

We bump into each other outside of his shop one evening as he's locking it up.  I mention that I should come in some time, I've never seen his stuff.  This, I quickly realize, is a very innocently stupid thing to say because of course he invites me in for a private screening of his store--a less than ideal scenario.  But with no real reason or excuse to back out, I follow him in.  He shows me his merchandise--beautiful furniture and china, old books and candelabras. Really neat antique stuff, and he tells me that when I have to furnish my house I should come back and he'll give the "family discount."  He is a class act and preciously genuine at the same time.  He calls me "sweet angel"--did I mention that?

As I'm leaving he starts telling me about his current girlfriend (my "aww, maybe he really is just a good guy" sentiments starting to leak out like air conditioning from a cracked window).  She is thirteen years younger, looks like a Barbie.  But shoot, he says, she wants to get married.  He doesn't want to.  "Because after the sex," he says, "what do we have in common?"  He laughs and shakes his head.  "I just want to fish with the fellas--I been married. I been there, I don't wanna go back."  I shake my head too, at a literal loss for words.  We don't think the same way about realtionships. He know's I'm getting married soon--he says he thinks we're young, but that it'll probably work out--perhaps a lie?  He says "as long as your in love..."  I assure him that we are.  I know he probably doesn't think my marriage will last, but I'm pretty sure he sincerely hopes for the best.

I tell him my last day at the coffee shop is Tuesday and he promises to come in.  He'll order his cappuccino and leave a dollar, promising I'll always get the family discount. 

Coffee shop blues

I am a barista at a coffee shop that is just about to go out of business.  The owner, a forty-year-old woman who recently separated from her husband after twenty-one years of marriage because of 'discontent', says that closing the store would break her heart because owning a coffee shop was her dream, her baby.

And though I am not overly attached to this coffee shop (I have only worked there for about four months), it occurred to me the other morning that it would be a microcosmic tragedy to see this place close its doors.

The shop is not glitzy.  It's basic--the music comes out of an old stereo system, the chairs are beat up and mixed up and the drinks are advertised on a chalk board above the register that was bought several years ago at Office Depot for $39.99.  In other words, each button pressed in a different way rings up the price for about five different drinks.  It hisses when you press the subtotal key sometimes, but not on Thursdays.  And sometimes, if you listen, you might hear it humming.  The stapler is busted but if you shake it, it might staple for you. But only once.  

The point I am getting at is that the shop itself is nothing to write home about.  The thing that makes this particular hole in the wall so terribly important is the motley hodgepodge of regulars who walk through the door each day.

At 6:30 a.m. I turn on the flashing sign to say OPEN and then plop down in front of the NY Times with my free coffee, the chief perk of employment here, and wait.  Within five minutes the small mouse girl comes in to order her large strawberry smoothie. (Did I mention that we make a variety of smoothies as well?)  She smiles and whispers her order, handing me her blue bank card.  I wonder if she knows that I know her order by now.  Or perhaps she still tells me because of the time that we were out of strawberry for a week and she had to choose something different. Traumatic. Her perfume reminds me of the waxy lip balm I used to buy at Claire's boutique when I was twelve--and I can smell it as soon as she reaches across the counter with her card. But she is sweet, and as she nods to thank me for the smoothie I wonder if she is quiet because it is so early or because she is just that diminutive of a person. 

Clint is a biker--a road cyclist, I should say--and he brings his own aluminum travel mug. He gets regular coffee, which costs him $1.60, but always puts a dollar bill in the tip jar which, so early, is usually empty. I hope that sometime I'll get to tell him how important that dollar is.  I think that for some reason this man looks at me like he knows that I am intelligent and capable.  He gets that it's hard to pay bills when you make close to minimum wage.  He gets that I'm trying to write a book--so he contributes a dollar a day, like you see on those commercials for kids who are poor in Africa.  I'm not that bad off, but the dollar a day really does make a difference.

There is a guy that comes in early, by eight o'clock at the latest, and orders a super sweet "coffee drink" with caramel,  and then sits down with his laptop in the seat by the window and begins typing, earbuds in place.  He will stay there all day--he actually sets up battlements.  He takes periodic bathroom breaks and around noon pulls out a peanut butter sandwhich and eats.  He stays until I leave--at four-thirty.  This guy is so disciplined it makes me nervous.  At first I feel like I should whisper, but by the time he's been there for all those hours, I kind of forget about him.  Recently I got the guts to interrupt his religious devotion and ask what he was doing.  This guy literally jumped at my question--I think he was so used to his own solitude that my address jarred him.  He actually stood up, walked over to the counter, and began to explain to me that he had recently spent a year in Egypt researching the economy and he was now back to write his thesis. And so that is what he was doing on these coffee shop days, writing his thesis from eight to five.  This of course made me feel totally childish, realizing that I could never sit still for nine hours to write literature on the economics of an African country.  So I offered him a cup of water.  He took it.

There are a lot of quirky every-dayers. One guy comes in for a medium coffee in a large cup with no lid. He also gets a pumpkin muffin on a large plate.  He microwaves it and then cuts it up into little bitty bite-sized pieces.  It's so strange, you know, watching a very well-groomed, well-spoken, good looking forty-five year old business man go about this ritual every day.  And then there is Deb, who calls in to order "her latte," which is a small latte with skim milk--pretty simple.  But if you ask her what she wants, she gets flustered and can't tell you.  Stuart, who gets a large coffee, is a bee keeper on his grandfather's farm.  This, of course, is not his "job"--this is for recreation.  His real job is maintenance at a private middle school in the area.  Barbara is a delightful mother of one who hates Fridays and loves Mondays because she cherishes the time that her husband is at work and her daughter is in school.  She comes in and orders a great big pastry and reads her library book.  Dr. Cell Phone, whose name we have recently discovered to be Denise, has her latte, and seems to always be in a very pressing conversation at the hour of seven each morning.  Who is already wound up at seven in the morning? Baffling.  

There is a coffee shop rolodex in the front of my brain--on each card there is a face and a drink.  Sometimes a pastry.  I just flip through that baby all day long every day and make drink by drink, like the steady humming of a loom. It's beautiful, really.  The shop is, for each person, their own little getaway spot.  The place where they brush shoulders with a "coffee girl" and maybe a few others.  But it's a kind of haven from home.  

And that is why it would be a crummy blow for our little coffee headquarters to go under.  The shop breathes with stories and brilliance.  A thesis to change the world is written here, friendships are grown here, houses have been bought and sold here, over-the-phone break-ups were here and broke high schoolers bring there dates here. Weary spirits are fueled here every single day.  They may not realize, but I've watched a thousand seeds planted in the two-hundred square feet of this place and a garden is growing.  I want to give it some more time.