Coffee house culture

I'm not used to having nothing to do. Even when I left a job I loved in order to stay home with my daughter, there was always something I should have been doing while I was doing something else: cleaning, working on a newsletter or web site, meeting with freelance clients, shopping (groceries, not clothes--ever tried taking a preschooler into a dressing room?), all while balancing motherly duties (bathing, feeding, playing, teaching, organizing field trips and plotting the location of each McDonald's between Lexington, Cincinnati and Ashland).

Monday, something strange happened. I took my daughter to preschool in another town about 30 minutes away (I'll be working there soon, so it only makes sense to have her in the same town). As she's only there about three hours, I reasoned that it didn't make a lot of sense, given the price of gasoline these days, to spend an hour driving home and back again. So, for a handful of hours, I had nothing to do.

I took a stack of projects and a copy of The Rainmaker and decided to spend the morning at a cute little coffee shop my friends had pointed out to me last summer. This was my first trip to a coffee shop alone, which meant I had no conversation to distract me from the goings-on in the aromatic little store.

Before I go any further, I feel I must take a moment to confess here.

I do not like coffee. It's much like my love affair with the aroma of pipe tobacco and smokeless tobacco, old leather, and the scent of hardwood smoldering in the fireplace. I love to smell fresh coffee brewing, or even simply walk through the coffee aisle at the grocery store. There is something deep and rich and comforting about these age-old aromas. I don't smoke, and certainly never tried stuffing a pouch of tobacco in my cheek, but I could quite happily settle in with a book, surrounded by those smells. I think it reminds me of my childhood; winter evenings by the fire, coffee percolating in the kitchen, my dad occasionally getting out his pipe, though my mother didn't like for him to smoke in the house. I'd get it out and breathe in the aroma of it whenever I got a chance.

So the steaming mocha late at the next table was a welcome neighbor as I settled in to one of the comfy leather couches and laid my portfolio on the granite slab table. I soon realized I was the only person there without a laptop, except for the pair who wandered in a few minutes later. I soon learned that they were from the seminary next door, not the law school across the street. Most of the most influential people in my life are connected to seminary in some way--either graduated or attended or plan to attend--and I must preface these next few sentences by saying I thoroughly enjoy engaging in meaningful conversations with them as much as anything. But the female member of the pair in the coffee house was thoroughly annoying.

While the rest of us read or hunched over keyboards, this girl--who probably would hunt me down and beat me with her Birkenstocks for describing her as such--set about arguing with the poor young man accompanying her and with anyone who dared make eye contact with her that marriage was never meant to be a sacrament of the church, that she would never marry, and that no one should ever suggest otherwise. Somehow, I don't think she has much to worry about.

I buried my nose in the book.

A few minutes later, a couple of law students wandered in. This is where I felt some pangs of envy, as I was supposed to take the LSAT Oct. 1 until I opted to put law school on hold in favor of continuing my endeavors in public relations. Actually, an enticing job offer came along, preschool came calling Meghan, and so off I go back into the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. crowd in a couple of weeks, ready to get to work, yet with a bit of remorse for the path not taken. My curiosity was aroused, then, when I heard the chatter that identified these latest coffee house patrons as law students. I watched with some amusement as the pair of blonde young women propped themselves up with their laptops and discussed their respective career aspirations while the young fellow behind the counter took great pains to clean the countertop over and over again while staring in their direction. After several attempts, the seminary student managed to lure the law students into her marriage diatribe. The thin young man with her had long since shrunk away from his feeble attempts to outline Biblical arguments against her position and simply slouched in silence. Not at all like the seminary folks I know, I thought. They'd silence her quickly, as these law students were attempting to do. It was amusing to listen to the three young women practice their apparently recently-acquired debating skills on each other.

You don't hear discussions like that in McDonald's, though I have heard a few heated political exchanges.

Sometime later, an older man came in and silenced them all with a withering look. By the time I got to the next chapter, the fellow behind the counter was the only other person in the shop.

Later in the week, I went to do a different shop--much smaller, less comfortable, and packed to the brim with people who were well past debating the course of their lives and were just trying to make the payments on their BMW's. Most of the exchanges in there were about real estate, insurance, and the front page of the local paper.

I quickly grew bored. I miss building forts in the living room.