We went to the Arlington Crate and Barrel to find a sideboard for the living room (there’s a long and boring story behind this, but never mind) and we stopped at Java Shack, our regular coffee shop when we lived in the neighborhood. I ordered some hot cider. I have fond memories of every single day I spent at Java Shack, including the time when a very loud man upset with Obama was yelling “show your birth certificate.” A real coffee shop is an important place. The Java Shack bulletin board led me to other places like the Spanish lessons I’m still taking today, and it’s where I would read a lot and talk to people and think about a bunch of things. There are three coffee shops that I would consider to have been important parts of my life, and I associate each of them with very different settings and moods. At Java Shack I would usually be there in the mornings, and a lot of times we’d go there first thing on the weekend and sit at the outdoor tables drinking lemonade. At Blue Monday, in the town where I went to college, I was often there after dark. That’s because I was in Minnesota, where it is always dark, and also because I would hang around ordering big mugs of chai when I still had another 200 pages to read in Bleak House. Java Joe’s in Des Moines was also a place I would go to at night, because this was in high school and I was in the middle of a four-year dark night of the soul. It was in a big smoke-filled room, which was allowed then, and there were teenage guitarists and a lot of hot chocolate. In the neighborhood where we live now, there is no coffee shop; I think you need a lot of young people as well as a fair number of rich people to support one, and a business owner who’s willing to follow a dream with little or no monetary reward. We have none of that here, and I miss the community. I suppose it’s a silver lining that I’ve been able to get better at making breakfast.
(Photo: Java Joe’s, Des Moines, Iowa.)
365 Days of Food 