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?