The Alcoholic Bartender

I’m beginning to understand why it is that alcoholics always seem to know, often times down to the minute, exactly how long they’ve been sober.

For several months before I bought the coffee shop, I was in the throws of doing some serious internal cleansing. I was practicing massage therapy, had access every day to a full gym, swimming pool and sauna. With my cleansing regime, I started with one element of the body and proceeded to work my way through. I had cut out all processed and hydrogenated foods, wheat, sugar and caffeine. I was working on my liver and my digestive health. I had been fasting and exercising almost every day. I was doing yoga and had discovered African dancing. Once a week I met with a specialist who helped “move the process along”. Everything was light as a feather and going great.

August 15th I bought the shop. My sleepless nights of worrying about the logistics turned into falling asleep on my feet as soon as I allowed myself to stop running. It’s pretty much gone this way since then…. With the occasional luxury of getting out of town or a Sunday that provides total respite from responsibility.

I had a surplus of extra time on my hands at my last job. I spent that time perusing library shelves, reading at the Stowe Coffee House, visiting friends who lived nearby (friends I miss dearly), working out… you name it. I drove forty five minutes to and from work and listened to audio books in my car. I think now that I may have taken all that extra me-time for granted. Now, a short walk through the meadows with my dog is a sweet luxury. I stop to watch birds and pet our neighbors horses and sometimes sit in the grass and savor where I am.

The alcoholic thing…..

I have this stupid condition called Dermagraphism. It shows up in young adults and can last anywhere from three months to an entire lifetime. My body produces too many histamines. If I scratch an itch, wipe something on my face, rub up against something, it leaves a raised, reddish welt in it’s wake for a much longer period of time than is reasonable. I’m like a walking Etch-a-Sketch. It’s nothing serious or life altering….. it’s just kind of annoying. After walking around with it for a year and a half now, I finally decided to go visit my naturopath in Burlington to see what she had to say about it. Well, that’s not true. Initially I went to visit a very pompous Eastern European allergist who gave this weird skin stuff a name but insisted that the only way to find any relief from it’s annoyances was to regularly take anti-histamines. I tried to delve deeper into the root of the problem, pointing out that the skin is the largest organ of the body and if that organ is out of whack, isn’t that symptomatic of something within the body possibly being out of whack? He got really frustrated and insisted that what I have is just a skin disease and nothing else. When I said I didn’t “buy it” he told me I didn’t have to “buy it“, that he was right and I was wrong and showed me to the door.

I’ve learned since that I have a slight metal allergy which is slowing down my immune system in general and causing my adrenals a wee bit of distress. I’ve begun taking a homeopathic histamine and Omegas 3 and 9. Once my body has acclimated to these, I’ll begin a series of acupuncture. In the meantime, I’ve had to completely eliminate caffeine and coffee altogether.

Yes, the coffee shop owner and constant barista cannot drink coffee. For the time being anyway…like, several months.

Yesterday, while I was filling the espresso bins I was counting the ways in which I interact with coffee every day. I order and inventory it, I pour it, I grind it, I tamper it. I weigh it, I brew it, I smell it, I sell it. I sometimes give it away. I draw shots of it, I steam milk for it, I mix mocha syrup into it. BUT, I no longer drink it.

It’s been 8 days, 2 hours and 42 minutes. But who’s counting?

YAHOOOOOO

Halloween Morning

It's the pre-dawn hour of Halloween day. I got to the shop today at 5:30 am so that I could get everything prepped for the day, have time to put on my costume AND.....try it out for a few minutes to make sure that i won't be breaking my neck pulling it off.

I just stripped down in the back room, pulled out the legwarmers, shivered at the sight of my little hot pant/gym shorts, zipped up the warm up jacket, considered the afro wig and laced up these forty pound roller skates. I'm about ten inches taller behind the counter now and get to do all those fun little loopty loops all day while rolling around.

Just put on Pandora funk, unlocked the door and now I wait for the first customer.... and hope that they're dressed more ridiculously than I am right now.

A Necessary Wednesday

It's a slow week here.... the college is on break so town is a little less populated. One of my girls, a student who has her first apartment and rent that's due, offered to take more shifts this week, so those of us who aren't students offered up whatever we could. I gave her my Wednesday opening shift so that I could take just one day off from waking up in the dark and maybe spend the day however I'd like. I asked a good friend to come and hike our new land with me. My house was clean... a pretty unusual thing these days.... so I didn't feel like I had to spend the day putting life back together on the homefront. I took a bit of time to place the food orders for the shop (from my couch) and check off my short list of things to do. Everybody (Bill and Ella) went away and I made myself some hot water with lemon, scratched my dog's belly and sat on the living room floor with a book until Annette arrived.

It was one of those epic fall days when the sun is warm and the leaves fall slowly from the trees like Japanese cherry blossoms. It's that time of year when all you can do is inhale the smell of the soil and composting leaves because too soon it will all be buried beneath several layers of snow. We hiked, we talked and talked and talked and grew this ever growing friendship, I got us lost for a good forty minutes.... having veered us offtrail and then not being entirely sure whether we were heading back toward civilization or off into the next county over seven or so miles of mountain terrain..... and.... we somehow ended up back at the fork in the stream where we started out in the first place.... the rush of a waterfall at our backs and a big, wide 100 acre piece of land at our feet and fingertips.

The hieffers nuzzled Annette's outstretched hands the cats curled around our ankles at our return. The sun was still high in the sky. We realized that the monarchs had a great big outburst of existence and so when Annette's car pulled away down the drive I took off my boots, ducked under the fence line and hunkered down in the overgrown milkweed and red clover of the pasture while dozens and dozens of butterflies went about their business. When Ella got off the schoolbus and came up the drive, I led her under the fenceline with me and sat her down in the feild. After fifteen seconds she started to see them... one after the other after the other....making their way from red clover blossom to another.... and it was one of those things neither of us will probably ever forget. There were sooo many!

It was one of those fall days that served as a kind of tonic preceeding the winter. Something to put a little heat in the belly and in the heart before we descend into deep freeze. A day to file the sun deep into the crevices of our skin and memory. A day to take off your shoes and make one last imprint in the front yard grasses.

Thanks, Jess, for taking my shift.

Late Night

Dave was riding me tonight about not writing more....so I am. We had a great Monday night music (which has moved from the backyard into the living room due to the onset of heavy frost and complaining neighbors) and now.... with just a fraction of free time.... I sit in the dark and even try to conjure up a way to capture what this is all about.

One thing I talked to him about was the element of candidness in this blog. A lot goes on behind this counter that I'm totally at liberty to write about...........but............there's really a good bit that I don't feel comfortable putting out there on the palette of public display....for more reasons than I should even get into here.

So..........I've taken to the occasional habit of writing a piece and filing it away in the drafts section of blogger.com..........so that it somehow gets out of my system but isn't out their for preview... possibly offending someone or revealing more than should be revealed. This whole business-on-main-street-gig is just a bit like living in a fishbowl and, as it turns out, I adore my customers enough(who are now very much my friends) that i don't want to regurgitate some of their shit onto the "pages" of blog-ville. At the same time, writing being what it is, if it's to be any good at all, needs to be honest honest honest, and so, despite my little secret society pages of the inside world here, I'll still do the best I can to put fingers to keys and keep an open dialogue of.............all this.

On my little black laptop I've written a bit of a low down of the past month.... the kitchen development, the drunk driver, etc..... and if all goes according to plan, I'll be able to post that little blip tomorrow.

In the meantime, however, let me just toot my own horn on the menu tonight for Monday Night Music.....

~a basic bowtie pesto past with sauteed summer squash.
~a chipotle chicken salad over arugula and spinach (thanks Dave for the prompting and prep)
~roasted fingerling potatoes
~coconut red curry peanut rice noodles with lime, garlic, ginger and cilantro
~tomato balsamic soup
~baked couscous with dried cranberries, walnuts, carmalized onion, butternut squash, and goat
cheese with an olive oil, orange zest, cinnamon, cumin and coriander drizzle

The shop is quiet. Broken down, instruments and sound equipment disassembled, lights off and doors locked. One town away my family sleeps and I should be heading in that direction to do the same. Tomorrow morning, the lunch box that will need packed and the child that will need ushered off to school, will come earlier than I might want it to if I sit at these keys any longer.

It's amazing how life continues to plow ahead even when you own a business. How the gardens get overgrown and the dust bunnies collect when all you're trying to do is keep the inventory stocked and the invoices filed. It's amazing how you're little girl grows up, somehow flourishing, in the backdrop of all of this. How the customers nourish her with all the little tidbits they have to offer.... a bunch of interesting grownups sharing whatever they have with this very interesting little eleven year old girl.

Time to go home, kiss her on the forehead, tuck the down comforter around her and wish her good dreams.

teaser

ok........
so i'm totally lame for not posting before this. it's been more than a month. totally negligent. i know. but just to give a taste of how it's been here..... we've had some heavy impact situations (ie; drunk driver, after stabbing someone three times and enduring a heavy police pursuit through the town of johnson, procedes to crash into the porch of my coffee shop... while i was out of town... oh the irony of it all)

exhibit A:


but.......... despite the nitty gritty funk of it all...............

we keep our chins up.


more later. i swear.

One Year Mark

Wish I had more time to write but, on the heels of my one year anniversary last Friday, I wanted to throw out the URL for my new, beautiful, 98% completed website. We still need some photos on the staff gallery page but otherwise, she's a beauty.

I spent my one year anniversary day learning how to body surf the waves in Rockport, Mass and drinking cosmos into the morning hours so I guess I can't be that bad off as a new business owner. There is more mulah in the business account now than when I started so that, too, is a good sign of success.

This past year has been the most beautiful display of community support and enthusiasm. Friends old and very new have come out of the woodwork to sit at my counter and offer their skills in sprucing up this town's most loved business. All my late night fears prior to the purchase have fallen to the wayside. I feared learning finances and bookkeeping and have (maybe not mastered but) learned it. I feared falling on my face behind the fishbowl of this main street venue but I haven't. My feet might be a little worse for the wear and I may have aged a few years in just this one.... but I'm not still breathing through the murky crazy straw of Stowe beauracracy and I'm doing my own thing happily.

So, check out the website, www.lovincupcafe.com, leave feedback, come drink coffee.