The Patrons

Most of my shifts are closing shifts. I jump behind the counter at 10:30, work through lunch with Holly until she leaves at 2pm and then I’m on my own till 5pm when we close…..usually locking up and heading home, after it’s all said and done, by six or six thirty. The closing shift is a long shift. The closing shift essentially sets up the morning person for a real smooth ride. We stock everything, get the beans all prepped, clean and break down the Astra espresso machine, re-wrap and stock the deli cooler, inventory the baked goods and stock the display case for the next day…… the list goes on. My awareness of this is currently heightened because I've hired a new girl, Jess McCoy, the real McCoy and she'll be taking over one of my closing shifts...so I've just created the official Closing Shift Duties list.

The morning person bakes the croissants, cooks eggs, and makes the chicken curry if need be. Sometimes iced tea needs brewing. Sometimes chai needs made. Holly, being the rock star she is, usually wraps her head around the soup of the day and has a recipe and ingredient list on hand by the time I arrive. Sometimes, she even has the soup made. Have I mentioned here before how much I love having Holly around?

Holly worked only closing shifts five days a week for one long year before I came on the scene. Having never been in the routine of opening, she had no idea how much easier the opening shift was until, right before I bought the place, she transitioned to all but one closing shift. Now that she’s got those easier shifts, she doesn’t want to give them up and I don’t blame her one bit. And because I feel like she’s put in her time, I’m in no rush to take them away from her. When I took the shop on, I was well aware that there would be long days, long hours and tired feet. I’m currently doing my time.

I only open the shop twice a week. Wednesday and Saturday. Saturday mornings are slow and drawn out. The crowd slumbers in later on Saturdays…. baggy eyed and drinking water before coffee. Wednesdays, though, make for a typical morning shift. I’ve got teachers on their way to class, farmers coming in for coffee before they tap trees or boil sap. All the regulars regularly join me at the counter, vying for the word scramble in the Living section and procrastinating on getting to their jobs. Some mornings are tamer than others but occasionally we have the boys on the floor wrestling, obscenities flying and/or things like proms being spontaneously designed.

This morning Jen sidled up to the bar first. She’s got two older kids, one of whom woke her today on her day off because he missed the bus. She figured since she was up, she may as well actually wake up. After dropping him off at high school and two refills at the bar, she actually started to come out of her slumber.

Wednesdays are my morning to visit with Mel and her son Miles. Mel and her husband moved in with me in 2001 after the birth of their daughter. They lived with me for almost a year and saw me through a temporary state of single parenting while they got adjusted to being a new family. We shared a big wooden house at the end of a long dirt road and had chickens and goats and cats and dogs and mice in the cupboards. We struggled with a long snowy driveway, chicken pox and ice dams on the roof. I was their doula for both of their children’s births and they are like family to me. Wednesdays I look forward to catching up with Mel and spoiling Miles with bottomless maple steamers. He’s been potty-trained at my shop. Now we’re working on breaking the thumb sucking.They were the next to arrive, always around 7:55am, having just dropped seven year old Adelle off at school. Today dad was along for the ride, too. The starter on their truck was fried, so they were stopping in to get beverages and visit before Peter set to fixing it. He and his twin brother, Steve, are like Click and Clack from Car Talk on NPR. They can fix anything.

Next to arrive was Brando. Brando and his brother Dusty have a couple of rooms in the upstairs of this old Victorian building where they run their web design business. They live next door to Mel and Pete at the end of a class four dirt road in the back woods of Johnson. Brando and Dusty teach karate to all of our kids and we are so blessed to have them in our lives. They arrive with hugs in the morning, wisecracks, and they always come down the stairs when I cry for technical assistance with the shop computers. They keep a tab at the shop and pretty soon that tab is going to be traded for the killer website we’re currently creating.

At this point, we’re out of seats at the bar so when Old Bob comes walking slowly but surely into the shop, Mel gets up and offers her seat. Bob is seventy two and moved to Vermont to be closer to his grandsons. He’s been sober for twenty four years and attends meetings every single day. He never learned how to read and write but he started his own landscaping business at sixteen years old, grew it gradually and successfully, sometimes faking that he could read the documents the bankers gave him. He had four greenhouses, thirteen employees, machines galore and rental properties all over Gloucester, Mass. When his ex-wife went over the edge and he ended up with custody of his four young kids he realized he needed to raise them up so he sold everything he had. He’s been “retired” ever since. He battles depression every day and some days, when the medication cocktails aren’t quite mixed correctly, he comes in quiet and sad and some days he’s real feisty. We take him any way he comes and love him just the same. For his birthday we got an ice cream cake and made sure we were all there when he arrived in the morning. We wore party hats and had noisemakers. We gave him his own mug. For Christmas, Holly knitted him a beautiful blue scarf. I began my New Years Eve walking into the new local pub with Old Bob on my arm. He drank ginger ale, stayed till the wee hours of the morning and watched us all get stupid and rowdy and dance our booties off. Hannah, beautiful Hannah, who works two days a week at the shop, is taking him to the prom. He’s a fixture. He and little Miles have developed a special connection and I think that, for Bob, seeing that little boy at the bar in the morning is one of the few highlights of his day. Miles sidles up next to him, shares his toast, looks at books with him and rests his head on his shoulder. There’s nothing more healing than a cute little kid. Especially a cute little kid that loves you to pieces.

Word Bob, the 'other Bob', came in next. He’s Word Bob because he and Holly have serious word scramble competition most mornings. Holly usually kicks his ass but he’ll never admit it. When Bob goes away on vacation, he sends us a postcard. The postcard is a long word scramble message usually looking like this:

Elolh acef lkosf!
Htisgn ereh era zinamag!
Lli letl ouy lla btoau ti hnew I tge akbc.
Elov,
obb

Bob never had a daughter but he would have been an incredible father to a daughter. He’s a mindful, sensitive, insightful man who blushes at the drop of a hat but always has the quick and clever (and often times rather suggestive) come-back. Bob calls Holly the daughter he never had. Bob paints for a living(was my consultant of sorts, when picking out colors for this place), does occasional wedding photography and sometimes comes in talking about the beautiful glow he found hovering over his head the previous night at yoga class. Gotta love Bob.

That’s how the days go here. That’s the typical morning crowd. Then things switch up as the day progresses. Nick comes in in the afternoon and gets either a chicken curry sandwich with red peppers, no greens or an everything bagel with goddess dressing, turkey, swiss and red peppers, no greens. A hibiscus herbal iced tea. A turnover. Nick is who came up with the prom idea with me. We are unofficially the prom planning committee. He’s got a band named Ghosts of Pasha. They’re pretty good.

David and Reed come in at 12:45 every day to get a single shot of espresso before they walk back around the corner to the studio center where David works in the admissions department and Reed is a computer guru.

Mark comes in to get a maple steamer. His comfort food. We joke that we should offer him a pacifier with it. Mark is the one who has the killer barn sale every summer.

There are so many more and I’ll make sure their stories trickle in when the stories are good. I’ll make sure I get proper permission.