Caffeine is magical. A double shot espresso will bring me out of a morass of lethargy and pessimism to a rejuvenated bundle of optimism-- from a near-catatonic state of lassitude to a state of mental clarity and drive!...in a matter of minutes. Nothing short of black magic.
While working behind the bar, I often think of my kindergarteners. That is, the task of taking care of my grown up customers to their satisfaction often reminds me of taking care of my 5-year-olds (who will be going into grade 2 this fall-- oh my...and my grade 2's will be huge 5th graders--oh my...). Especially in the way some of them interrupt without consideration, feel wounded to the core when I accidentally skip past them in line (my bad!), and seek special attention of which I can only give so much at a time-- especially then I think of my kindergarteners. Sometimes, I see very little difference between those to whom I served an education, and those to whom I serve coffee. In both age groups, this sort of behavior is at once endearing and maddening.
Akin to the feeling I had at the end of the teaching year in Iraq, though to a lesser degree, is this feeling I have now that I will miss many of the faces I have come to know since last June when I served my first coffee at the flagship store at Rittenhouse Square. Though I will be working a mere 5 blocks away at our new Ritz-Carlton location, I know that 5 blocks in the city can be a great distance especially to the heavily habitual folks who frequent my coffeeshop. "People are creatures of habit," to quote my Serbian co-worker. They get the same drink every day for years. You can work there for years and memorize everyone's drinks, then leave for 2 years, come back, and that list of drinks will have undergone little alteration. Miss Julia will still get her cappuccino (and dress like Mrs. Peacock in the Billiard Room with the Candlestick), Miss Susanna her half-milk-half-coffee au lait, Fancy Nancy her mostly milk au lait, Mr. Koresh his red-eye, the three dark-haired men who get Americanos for "here" every day and linger for hours in solitude over their work, the silver-haired, suited gentleman who looks extraordinarily like Sean Connery and stands at the side of the bar every day drinking his espresso and giving off heady waves of his customized cologne from Paris, the younger man who also takes an espresso every day (and takes a regular drip coffee to-go as well), who aims to emulate the classiness of the Sean Connery espresso drinker, sexy Natasha who gets a cappuccino in a paper cup every day between hairstyling sessions, the spinal surgery man who gets a double-cupped black coffee and a decaf for his pregnant wife, the parents of Elsa...and so on. The penniless artist will still be there laughing one minute and weeping the next, and you still won't be able to tell which is which because they will both still sound the same; old Bill will still come up to the bar and share with you random facts about high art and the same 4 phrases in Greek that he knows. The scraggly old woman will still sit alone in her corner scribbling code in the margins of her little notebook for hours on end. The other day, she was sitting right over the edge of the side of the bar, and so while pretending to clean, I leaned over and tried to see exactly what she was scribbling, but I couldn't make out anything sensible-- or perhaps I mean to say "sane". Christ...sometimes, I don't know how to feel about this time capsule nature of the shop-- whether to feel suffocated by its unflagging invariance, or adore it for its timelessness.
Yesterday after work, I bought groceries for my big cooking endeavor (vodka penne) and had to rest my arms on the way home. While sitting on a brick ledge in the hot sun, I saw one of my customers coming my way-- Joel, the very sweet Rittenhouse Market grocer who gets a cup to-go every day. We were neighbors, it turned out; he lived a mere two blocks away from my house. A short while later, he was giving me a tour of his very narrow and tall abode that was more like a treehouse than a house in the city. It had three stories with a narrow spiraling staircase that led to each one. The rooms were of modest size and the entire place had the air of an era gone by, nearly vanished or at most pushed into the peripheries and dusty, aging, slowly forgotten corners of this world, in this age of wireless and constant bombardment of high-tech noise. There was no wifi, no internet at all, no computer, no cell phone. What he did have was books and paintings. He was a local painter. On his walls hung huge canvases of industrial scenes around Philadelphia, some which no longer even exist. On the third floor was his work space and the walls in here were lined from top to bottom and side to side with hundreds of magazines-- the canary yellow spines of National Geographic filling one entire wall, another half of a wall filled by the thinner, taller ivory-colored spines of Life Magazine, some of which dated back to WWII, another half of a wall dedicated to art books and the other half of that wall stacked with the classics he had read in college-- Solzhenitsyn, Sartre, Steinbeck, Tolstoy. If you know me at all...
He had a cat and he arranged his food like a grocery store. On top of his fridge was a very orderly pyramid of canned soups. Next to this pyramid was a very orderly stack of Kashi brand cereal. He opened his freezer and I burst out laughing. The inside was packed with frozen tv dinners, all of the same brand-- the one with the bright orange colored box. His great (great-great?) grandfather had been in the grocery business. His uncle and several others in his family had also been painters. He was a man who faithfully carried on his family's traditions.
I walked out of his house with my groceries, a host of new impressions, and a new book called "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy. I walked the two blocks home and thought how curious it all was. I walked one block toward my house and waved to a a blue-eyed, cherub-haired man waiting at the wheels of his black car with his window rolled down. He was my next-door neighbor and another regular at my shop-- a connection I discovered 10 months after I had been serving him his double cappuccino every morning.
While working behind the bar, I often think of my kindergarteners. That is, the task of taking care of my grown up customers to their satisfaction often reminds me of taking care of my 5-year-olds (who will be going into grade 2 this fall-- oh my...and my grade 2's will be huge 5th graders--oh my...). Especially in the way some of them interrupt without consideration, feel wounded to the core when I accidentally skip past them in line (my bad!), and seek special attention of which I can only give so much at a time-- especially then I think of my kindergarteners. Sometimes, I see very little difference between those to whom I served an education, and those to whom I serve coffee. In both age groups, this sort of behavior is at once endearing and maddening.
Akin to the feeling I had at the end of the teaching year in Iraq, though to a lesser degree, is this feeling I have now that I will miss many of the faces I have come to know since last June when I served my first coffee at the flagship store at Rittenhouse Square. Though I will be working a mere 5 blocks away at our new Ritz-Carlton location, I know that 5 blocks in the city can be a great distance especially to the heavily habitual folks who frequent my coffeeshop. "People are creatures of habit," to quote my Serbian co-worker. They get the same drink every day for years. You can work there for years and memorize everyone's drinks, then leave for 2 years, come back, and that list of drinks will have undergone little alteration. Miss Julia will still get her cappuccino (and dress like Mrs. Peacock in the Billiard Room with the Candlestick), Miss Susanna her half-milk-half-coffee au lait, Fancy Nancy her mostly milk au lait, Mr. Koresh his red-eye, the three dark-haired men who get Americanos for "here" every day and linger for hours in solitude over their work, the silver-haired, suited gentleman who looks extraordinarily like Sean Connery and stands at the side of the bar every day drinking his espresso and giving off heady waves of his customized cologne from Paris, the younger man who also takes an espresso every day (and takes a regular drip coffee to-go as well), who aims to emulate the classiness of the Sean Connery espresso drinker, sexy Natasha who gets a cappuccino in a paper cup every day between hairstyling sessions, the spinal surgery man who gets a double-cupped black coffee and a decaf for his pregnant wife, the parents of Elsa...and so on. The penniless artist will still be there laughing one minute and weeping the next, and you still won't be able to tell which is which because they will both still sound the same; old Bill will still come up to the bar and share with you random facts about high art and the same 4 phrases in Greek that he knows. The scraggly old woman will still sit alone in her corner scribbling code in the margins of her little notebook for hours on end. The other day, she was sitting right over the edge of the side of the bar, and so while pretending to clean, I leaned over and tried to see exactly what she was scribbling, but I couldn't make out anything sensible-- or perhaps I mean to say "sane". Christ...sometimes, I don't know how to feel about this time capsule nature of the shop-- whether to feel suffocated by its unflagging invariance, or adore it for its timelessness.
Yesterday after work, I bought groceries for my big cooking endeavor (vodka penne) and had to rest my arms on the way home. While sitting on a brick ledge in the hot sun, I saw one of my customers coming my way-- Joel, the very sweet Rittenhouse Market grocer who gets a cup to-go every day. We were neighbors, it turned out; he lived a mere two blocks away from my house. A short while later, he was giving me a tour of his very narrow and tall abode that was more like a treehouse than a house in the city. It had three stories with a narrow spiraling staircase that led to each one. The rooms were of modest size and the entire place had the air of an era gone by, nearly vanished or at most pushed into the peripheries and dusty, aging, slowly forgotten corners of this world, in this age of wireless and constant bombardment of high-tech noise. There was no wifi, no internet at all, no computer, no cell phone. What he did have was books and paintings. He was a local painter. On his walls hung huge canvases of industrial scenes around Philadelphia, some which no longer even exist. On the third floor was his work space and the walls in here were lined from top to bottom and side to side with hundreds of magazines-- the canary yellow spines of National Geographic filling one entire wall, another half of a wall filled by the thinner, taller ivory-colored spines of Life Magazine, some of which dated back to WWII, another half of a wall dedicated to art books and the other half of that wall stacked with the classics he had read in college-- Solzhenitsyn, Sartre, Steinbeck, Tolstoy. If you know me at all...
He had a cat and he arranged his food like a grocery store. On top of his fridge was a very orderly pyramid of canned soups. Next to this pyramid was a very orderly stack of Kashi brand cereal. He opened his freezer and I burst out laughing. The inside was packed with frozen tv dinners, all of the same brand-- the one with the bright orange colored box. His great (great-great?) grandfather had been in the grocery business. His uncle and several others in his family had also been painters. He was a man who faithfully carried on his family's traditions.
I walked out of his house with my groceries, a host of new impressions, and a new book called "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy. I walked the two blocks home and thought how curious it all was. I walked one block toward my house and waved to a a blue-eyed, cherub-haired man waiting at the wheels of his black car with his window rolled down. He was my next-door neighbor and another regular at my shop-- a connection I discovered 10 months after I had been serving him his double cappuccino every morning.
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