Sunday, September 30, 2007

Hello Out There

So, who's airborne hippie? That was the funniest comment I've had in a long time!

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Holy Shit

When the guides from Trekk Travel came in this week to ask if they could bring in their group of 26 bicyclists on Saturday, they assured me that they would all come staggering in between the hours of 11:30-1pm.

Come noon, all 26 bikers came tapping down the hall in their funny spiked shoes.... plus the regular Johnson Saturday crowd, plus a slew of parents and kids from JSC (Parent's Weekend at the college).

It's now getting on 5pm and I'm sitting down with a salad and taking a breath. The day has been a flurry of sandwiches, soups, dishes and register zone. I * am * so * glad * I * prepped * like * hell * for * this * day!

Hot damn.

Bill came in for a latte before heading across the street to get some work done and got pulled behind the counter to help prep some plates and catch up on the dishes. I think he got stuck back there for an hour and a half.

An hour or so after he left, Word Bob jumped behind the counter to do some more dishes. He got a free lunch.

I just don't think this place is cut out for that kind of volume.

But the tab for Trekk Travel came to almost $300 so I'm not complaining.
Looks like a record day.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Gateway

Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun, talks about Sim and Ripka. Sim is the Tibetan word for "clutter of the mind". It's the buzzing and random dialogue and come-backs one never thought to use on time. It's the hesitation and the passion and the disorganization of thought. A stumbling over and over of just too many things. Our best friends, inspirations and worst enemies all vying for our mental attention. It's the stuff that gives us headaches, keeps us up later than we want to be, and gets on our fucking nerves. It's the stuff that makes our shoulders hurt.

Ripka is space. It's the space between all that clutter. The doorway between the in breath and the out breath. It's the place where the water meets the shore, when it's neither coming nor receding, ebbing or flowing.

When I'm getting on my own nerves with all that fear and self doubt, when I'm lying in bed at night wondering if I'd forgotten to place a bakery order or file a receipt, wondering what I may have done taking on this shop, wondering about.... so much.....it's sometimes just a matter of remembering to repeat over and over again in my head~
sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim

and then stop
take a deep breath
notice the space between
and then
R*i*p*k*a

Ella was right...

Her new art teacher does look like Uncle Vernon from Harry Potter.
A bit nicer, though.
Says Bean has some real talent.

We missed the jello molds... got there just as the principal was announcing that the parents could now take a look around and get the tour. Ella walked us through her classroom and their daily routine, we visited the book fair where she purchased a marker that smelled like buttered popcorn, and I tried hiding my many yawns... the thoughts of coming back to the shop after the open house just lingering like bad mosquito bites in the back of my head.

We came home, ate what little food we could find in the house (since mom has no time any more for things like grocery shopping and daily household maintenance), I read a bit of the first Harry Potter to Els, and said my goodbyes and goodnights.

I'll be back at 6am to open. I should have just brought my feather blanket and curled up on the couch.... have myself a one person slumber party. I could have brought our portable dvd player and Ella's buttered popcorn marker.

Blip

It's one of those rare moments where I have the laptop open on the counter during business hours. I figure that I'll get three sentences in before people come flooding in. We'll see.

I'll have to lock the doors tonight and head out without taking care of any of the closing duties....come back late night to put it all together for the morning staff. Ella has open house at her school tonight. We'll miss the potluck segment, which I can't say I'm entirely disappointed about. One can only handle so many jello molds and macaroni salads in their lifetime. But we'll get there in time to take the tour of her classroom, meet the parents and teachers, etc. These events are always a little weird. I don't know if I'll ever get used to being the parent of a school aged kid. In my head I'm still trying to rush home in time to sneak the 'poor work notices' out of the mailbox before my folks find them. Those little pink pieces of paper haunted me viciously from third grade till twelfth. I'd have been a perfect candidate for either Ritalin or homeschooling.

Well, that was ten sentences. Forty minutes later. This is getting old.
Signing out.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Pullin' a Late One

It's ten after twelve.

A.M.

And I really should go home...but I drank a double latte around 7pm and I know that if I lay myself down right now my head will go abuzz till at least 3am. I'm sparing myself the misfiring wires and tossing and turning. People have a hard time believing that I only drink coffee two or three times a week here. I think I need to be a bit more selective about when I choose to drink it, though.

We close at 6pm and I'm usually able to start breaking things down around 5pm so that, come six, all I have to do is clean the brewers, bleach the boards, sweep, mop and count the drawer. Tonight, though, Helen came in around 4:30 to show me how to get online and pay the monthly Meals and Rooms tax and also how to pay the payroll tax. It wasn't until 6:30 that we finished with that. I still had a customer in the living room taking an exam on-line for a class and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day.

I bought smoked salmon today on my Costco run so that I could offer it as a bagel sandwich and I went ahead this afternoon and erased a big portion of my chalk board so that I could re-write the sandwich into the menu.

Whaddya think ~ smoked salmon, cream cheese, red onion and organic greens on a toasted bagel? Kind of typical but a good stand by.

So I erased the board right before I got slammed with a thousand lunch orders, which led me right into my meeting with Helen, which led me right past closing and there it was... 11pm... and I'm covered in chalk and jacked on caffeine and standing on the counters trying to be just the tiniest bit artistic in my penmanship... hands kind of shaking. And can I just say how very much I hate the sound of chalk on a chalk board? About as much as the sound of styrofoam. About as much as the sound of a napkin being rubbed together. (About as much as the sound of a hand on the fabric of the ceiling of a car??) Isms.

But the board is written, the dishes are done, the sandwich was tested and approved and I'm about five minutes away from a serious caffeine crash. G'night.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Biography

The Grateful Dead played twice in Highgate, Vermont in the mid-nineties. In 1994, I was supposed to work that night and the following day at Katana... the local, mid-town sushi joint. Two hours before I was due in to work, I called in desperately sick.... and was on the road. I was living in an old, brick Sesame Street double block at the time, that my mom still has nightmares about..... I'm surprised I don't still have nightmares about it.

We made it to the show, got in for free because they just plain old opened the gates (gotta love Vermont) and then left immediatley afterward at midnite. According to plan, I would have been home with three hours to spare before I was due in for my shift at the sushi joint, but we took directions from our friend TJ, who happened to be way too high to give effective directions, and what could have been a seven hour drive from Vermont to Pennsylvania turned out to be a twelve hour drive through Connecticut rush hour traffic, where everyone that drove around us either beeped or flipped us off because a Volkswagon bus, with it's windows down in fast rush hour traffic on a Connecticut freeway, is not dissimilar to a woffleball in a wind storm.... and I had to call in almost four hours late and ended up bathing and changing and finally, after all that time, brushing my hair in the bus and they practically (whoever was driving, I think it was you, Dave) just dropped the thing down into second gear as I jumped out at mid-town in my black pants and black shirt.

The second year I drove into Highgate, Vermont I was in my bus again... but this time it's interior was sweetly decorated and packed to the gills, ready for some kind of cross-country venture. Our quack mechanic supposedly rebuilt the engine and my dad advised me to, "every time the oil gets low, throw in a quart or so of oil".....'

It was seven hours to Vermont. By the time we hit the Adirondack lakes, we blew our air filter from all that oil (we kept a whole case under the fold out sofa in the van).... We ended up sawing off the end of a broom handle and lodging it between the air filter and the roof of the engine compartment to keep that filter on through a basic, first-into-second acceleration. Our first, of many, chic McGyver moves.

It was after that Highgate show that we drove into Johnson for the first time. We pulled into Main Street, just across from the coffee shop, and went into ~ what was then ~ The Pie Safe... a gift shop/deli type joint that was once the big bank in town. I think the safe had been transormed into the beer cooler.

It's now the corner book store/yarn shop. A beautiful place. Makes me wish I actually bought books new. Or bought books at all, really. My walls are too full of books I've collected over the years, books I have yet to read, to allow myself the luxury of new books. And I have way too much going on to actually knit. Much as I'd like to.

From there we landed at the farm house... and it was there that me and my van spent most of the rest of the summer.... floating through the pastures out back in patch work dresses, drinking iced coffee, smoking cigarettes and figuring out the world on the front porch of the coffee shop... all in between the four or five swimming holes we "clocked in" at through out the afternoon.

It was that summer that Johnson became my stomping ground. It was that summer that the cops would slow down as they drove past the coffee shop... taking long looks.... taking notes. It was that summer that the big cedar flower buckets placed all along the Main Street corners kept gettting trimmed down by local officials because, in between the pansies and wisteria, weed kepting growing up.

It was the same summer I learned to swim naked, that I read Mists of Avalon, that I learned to hoola-hoop, play devil sticks and widdle. I learned that summer how to build a fire, how to fish, and how to walk across a log (or as Kalinas called it... do the "walk of faith"). The first time I walked that log, my ass was black and blue for weeks. Faith took me some time. The better part of the summer, really.

I spent the next summer in Johsnon without the bus. It was the victim of my driving.. a head on collission outside of Philadelphia... the frame cracked... poor girl ruined. I lived in a tent and all my books got moldy. We built a clay oven and baked lasagne, we built devil sticks in the garage, I hitch-hiked with girlfriends. Slept on the ocean in Maine, got ticks on the ocean in Cape Cod, wrapped my arms around a Redwood in the middle of the night on a new moon in Northern California, slept in the Sequoias in Oregon and in a van in San Francisco.

That was the first year that I came back to Vermont and watched the summer turn into Autumn. It was the first time that I felt the nights here cool to an early frost, watched the rivers build a great, long mist in the morning, and woke to snow on a mountain top in September. It snowed in the valleys on Halloween that year... the first snow.

The shop porch is starting to collect red and yellow leaves. When I arrive in the morning, everything still wet with early frost, the paper having barely arrived (if it arrives at all) and the Main Street traffic still a bit sporadic, the porch is covered like confetti with dry, colorful leaves.

I can hardly remember that first fall. I can just remember the smell of the air. The way it felt on the skin. The shock of shorter days and the pace at which they shortened. I can remember renting a small little farmhouse apartment and loving the taste of maple syrup on a spoon. I can remember not having a bookshelf and so stacking the books from the floor on up. I can remember the jet-liner sound of the oil heater in our living room and just how quickly we would run out of hot water. I remember the horses up the road and how I would not wash my hands for hours so I could keep the smell on them.

I remember the transition from iced coffee on the porch of the shop to drinking hot coffee in the fall. And now, here it is late-ish September and I've had the same half gallon pitchers of iced coffee in the fridge since last weekend and, kinda like wearing flip flops till Mid-November, I just can't bring myself to pour them down the drain.

All of a sudden, I'm running out of little tea pots for my customers, instead of running out of pint glasses.... I'm making an awful lot of hot tea and hot lattes instead of iced tea and iced coffee. I'm walking faster from my car to the front door in the morning and I'm wondering if the place came with it's own snow shovel and rock salt.

We had dinner tonight with friends. Yellowtail nori rolls and miso soup with a 1990 Jerry Band show playing on the TV in the other room.... the year Brent died and they moved from the regular tour into Jerry Band tour. A mean Lucky Old Sun..... like nothing I've ever heard.

Before dinner, Ella did her homework... which was just a free-write in her journal. After dinner we tried doing splits in the living room (the hosts were Bean's karate teachers and they had come straight from karate to dinner). When we got into the car to go home, after our splits and dancing in the living room, Ella said to me, "Mom, I think I brought out your inner child." We sang to Regina Spektor the whole way home.

She wrote a poem for her free-write.

A POEM FOR AUTUMN

A chilly evening
Underneath the moon
The thought of summer
Usually means fun
Many colors fill my eyes
Now that I'm back to fall.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Editor-In-House

Last week I was interviewed by a student from the journalism department at Johnson State College. Today, the head of the journalism department, an awesome guy named Tyrone, came in to deliver a stack of the first edition of the paper. The paper is called Basement Medicine... which just has to be respected... whether you're a Dylan fan or not.

I have to say, though, that as I was reading through the article I kept cringing at things I didn't say or were just wrong.

Since I put an ad in the same paper and the address for the blog is listed in the ad... I'll take the opportunity to make the necessary changes.

Hhmmm.

  • Let's see... while my family pretty much exists here as much as I do and while Bill has been the left side of my brain since I bought the joint and Ella does do a mighty fine job of wiping tables and wiping me out of baked goods and hot chocolate... technically, I bought the place myself and am the sole owner. Bill likes to point this out, occasionally, as well. It might be his disclaimer should this all come crumbling down like Roman Empire someday.

  • I moved to Vt almost twelve years ago, not five years ago. Every year that passes here feels like a great accomplishment to me... having survived another long winter, becoming more entrenched in what it means to live in this northern climate and culture... so yes, I must correct.

  • And no, I have to admit, all the ingredients to my turkey and Jason sandwiches are not organic and fair trade, although the coffee and the teas most certainly are. When I make my first million on this joint, I promise that I will most definitely begin purchasing organic, fair-trade deli meat and cheese... because it will most definitely take a million to maintain that kind of quality in this kind of economy.

  • Yerba Mate is not technically caffeine free. There's some debate as to what Yerba Mate really is. It's considered a "stimulant"... according to Wikipedia... so those coming in for a nice, relaxing Yerba... be warned. It does jack you.

And yes, I did say that I could have appropriately named this place The Bachelor Pad. And yes, I did suggest to all the single, seeking ladies to feel free to stop in anywhere between 9am and noon to find them hanging out at the bar.... or, as it's been lately, on the floor competing to see who can pump out the most push-ups. I shit you not.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Wednesday Night Jitters

It's 9pm, the child is in bed and the barista is at the shop, has steamed up some chai and is now about to embark on the kitchen project. It's too bad it's not a clear night. I may end up outside again at 4am on a fleece blanket, wrapped in wool, warped with caffeine jitters. Maybe the stars will be out by that time..............

When the health inspector, a very humorless man with a very bad haircut, came in about a month ago, I scored a 96 out of a possible 100. I wish I did that well in high school.

I lost a point for the spoons being spoon side up at the creamer station (which I know about but was training the new girl that day and forgot to specify when she took the clean batch out... my bad). I lost a point for a rip in the screen door we don't use and for some gaps in the ceiling in the back kitchen space around the heating vents where mice can squeeze through if they so chose.

Not too bad, really, considering. I had no idea what to expect. I just received my official License to Operate in the mail today.

I learned when he was here that all unfinished wood in a kitchen has to be painted over or sealed in some way. So I went out today and bought some deep red paint. I was hoping for a funky shade of purple or a funky mauve but the local hardware type place, where Bill has an account and I could get his discount, seemed to be out of whatever base they needed to make every single color I asked for. The deep red color was a stock color, which meant they have it in house, already mixed, and so I ended up with that. I eventually just started feeling bad for the employee, who was feeling bad for having to keep saying he couldn't make this or that shade. Maybe I'll just accent the red with another color down the road... from another, more equipped paint place. I figure that the kitchen space won't be seen by customers so I can get as crazy as I want to with it.

I came in an hour ago and so far haven't been able to leave the computer except to make my chai. It was hard enough getting into the car to come into town. Took a look at some of the wedding pics (thanks Jim) and checked email.

Now, though, I need to roll up my sleeves and get dirty. In about twenty minutes my every nerve ending will be pulsing with a blend of Kashmiri and Tra Quai chai tea..... I need to utilize that time well.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Wedding and Back Again

The wedding was incredible. It took place on a beautiful, four-masted ship called the Moshulu. I threatened for months to come dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow and I was surprised that none of my brother's friends didn't actually do so. The bridesmaid dress was pretty but dancing to the electric slide (which I didn't actually do but my mother, however, stole the show) would have been much more entertaining had I been sporting black, beaded dreads and a dagger. Next time....

We stayed at the Hyatt on Saturday and Sunday night, which you could almost spit on from the ship, and other than the half dozen wedding parties staying at the Hyatt, the hotel was hosting American Idol auditions that weekend. There were a few Paula Abdul sightings and that Simon guy was floating around as well. Beautiful, robust Philadelphia women could be found along the waterside, just outside the hotel, belting beautiful blues, looking nervous and waiting their turn. Occasionally one could be seen running down the roped off escalator, a pink piece of paper waving in their hand, screaming that they were "goin' to Hollywood!" I've never actually seen American Idol so it was all kind of lost on me.... the one channel we get up here in the hills, via the bent clothes hanger that serves as a rabbit ears antennae, must not get the station that broadcasts the show.

Poor Bill spent the next day, his 35th birthday, taking turns driving and napping on our eight hour drive back from Phillie to Vermont. I'm sure he was dreaming the entire time of the waves he might have caught somewhere else.... anywhere else. Tomorrow I'm going to drop into his work site across the street with a birthday cake and a case of Heiferweizen for he and his boys. If they're lucky, maybe I'll follow carpenter suit and tell them all the dirty jokes Dana shared with me tonight on the phone.

And back to the coffee shop.....

It's almost been a month in business and so far I haven't gone bankrupt. The numbers are higher than breaking even, which is a good sign, and the nightly cash-outs are higher than they were before I took the place over.... which means that more business is, indeed, coming through the door and into the register.

I haven't had the time to start turning the kitchen space into a kitchen space and I'm starting to realize that it'll probably require more of those 6pm to 2am chai latte work sessions to actually make it happen. But as it stands right now, I'm paying a baker an awful lot of money and spending way too much time at home making the par-baked croissants and brewing chai tea. Once that space is finished all that stuff can be done here, while I'm working, and life will become exponentially less tiresome.

Bill has taken over the bookkeeping for now... till I get my head wrapped around everything behind the counter. He's been creating systems for filing and getting an understanding of how things should be put into and organized in Quickbooks so that, when I'm ready, he can convey it all to me and pass the baton. I come home at night, sometimes not until 8 or 9pm, after a 14 hour day, and he's sitting on the couch with my laptop and nightly cash out sheets. And he's doing this after spending an hour or two organizing his own business... when I know he'd much rather be spacing out on the arrival of his new Netflix surf video. I get flooded with gratitude when I see him sitting there because even though it's already been a fourteen hour day, I still have to pull baked goods to proof and brew chai and read to and hang out with Ella before bedtime and then go over that day's invoices and receipts before my own bedtime. Thanks Billy boy. I promise we'll celebrate your birthday better than we did on Monday. If anyone out there wants to send him a plane ticket to Costa Rica, I'm sure he'd appreciate it very much.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Leaving the Baby

It’s hard to believe that just two weeks after buying a business , I have to leave town for a long weekend. Not really the best timing and the next time my brother plans a weddin I’ll have to remind him to keep that in mind.

The whole family has been buzzing about the first big wedding among our generation. Considering the intense commitment issues all us cousins have, this event is mighty impressive.

On Wednesday, my uncle Bobby arrived in Vermont, straight from El Paso, Texas, to visit me for the first time ever. He spent a couple of afternoons at my coffee bar, meeting the locals, eating pastries, drinking Moroccan Mint tea and mingling with the other many Bobs that frequent my shop.

There’s “Old Bob” … a retired recovering alcoholic of twenty four years, who moved up from Gloucter, Massachusetts two years ago to be closer to his grandkids. He arrives every morning, sometimes sitting on the porch with the newspaper on his lap when I go out to hang the open flag. His doctor told him to cut his caffeine in half so he gets a “half and half”… half a mug of coffee topped with half hot water. Occasionally he gets two in a row. Like, why not just consolidate Bob? Along with his half and half, he gets his daily “prison toast”… a sourdough baguette, toasted “crispy but not burned” with butter. He has white hair, a white beard and wore red in his driver’s license picture so he looks just Santa Claus. When kids come in to the bar, he pulls out his wallet and asks if they know that guy.

There’s Word Bob… a sweet, gentle spirited, middle-aged guy who paints for a living and has given me a slew of good advice about color tones and themes for the shop. He drinks Earl Gray tea, in a stapled tea bag instead of a tea pot, served in a big cappuccino mug and then takes the tea bag, stuffs it into a to go cup when he heads out for his day of meditative painting. He competes with Holly, my twenty one year old, incredibly hard working barista, to see who can decode the newspaper’s daily word scramble first. She usually wins. Bob practices yoga, has been getting regular tuning fork energy work and has an incredible, clean energy about him. He lives in the village of my town and his wife’s horses freckle the roadside pasture beautifully.

I got some pics of Old Bob and uncle Bob making history at my bar.

So yesterday was a day of traveling… eight hours from Vermont to Center City Philadelphia….and it was straight from the car into the lion’s den of a bachelor/bachelorette extravaganza. By the time the girls and boys merged paths at a bar called the Garage (and it really was a renovated garage) my brother was in a condition I’ve never before seen him in. When I sidled up next to him later in the night, giving him my shoulder to keep him from slumping forward, I raised his pint glass of lemon water to his mouth trying to hydrate him. He pulled some water through the straw, pulled the straw from the glass of water, turned to me and sprayed the water all over my face and shirt.

Drunk and defenseless he might have been but I returned the offense. I felt like I was twelve years old all over again, except my folks weren’t around to bitch.

Seventeen rowdy people slept like puppies in this half a house while Bill and I enjoyed the great outdoors of a Roxborough backyard. I think we might have been the only two in our posse that showed some self restraint. Instead of shot after shot of random colored and flavored booze, topped with mixed drinks and micro-brews, I sipped on two beverages through the night, accompanied with a ton of water and woke up feeling ready for back yard yoga and a jog.

My brother, on the hand, has just become vertical. It’s past noon and the poor fellow is a dull shade of jaundice yellow. It’s a good thing the wedding isn’t till tomorrow. He has one more day to get some recovering in.

Coffee shop? What coffee shop?