Paul Rathburn

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If you’re looking for an argument, grab yourself a cup of coffee and pull up a chair.

You’ll find yourself in a rag-tag debating society where arguments are floated on topics ranging from trivial to existential.

At any given table and at any spot in the windows of the coffee shop, clusters of people are exchanging opinions.

Irrefutable facts and hard data are duly respected here, of course, but a quick wit wins the day as often as not. There’s a contingent of leg-pullers, hoodwinkers and bomb throwers who keep things from getting tedious.

A guy named Paul (seated center, blue shirt) enjoys a slight advantage given that he’s dedicated years of his life to arguing criminal and civil points of law.

When a lawyer says he was ‘argumentative’ as a child, it’s probably safe to assume he was a manifest pain in the the ass – which happens to be exactly what you want from the court-appointed attorney defending your rights.

Paul’s career included investigating how police departments, prosecutors and judges met, or failed to meet, their constitutional obligations in dealing with defendants.

He litigated employee abuse, domestic violence and suits on behalf of terminally-ill disabled clients. He won receiverships against landlords who cut off heat to drive renters out of their apartments.

At a time when legislators and insurance companies were openly antagonistic toward HIV patients, Paul Rathburn was recruited by the Legal Aid Chicago’s HIV/AIDS Law Project. It took on a personal meaning when he lost his sister to AIDS in 1998

It’s a welcome change, Paul says, that the directions of peoples’ lives don’t hang on the freewheeling debates he enjoys sharing with his buddies these days.

For the modest price of a cup of coffee (decaf served until 11 a.m.) there’s a seat at the table for all comers, but don’t expect to get the last word.

At our humble coffee shop, there is no such thing as a last word.

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Mexico City

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It’s no wonder the Colombian family found itself hunkered down on the curb of Avenida Centenario.

After all Spanish speakers like the Ortizes don’t describe things as happening “sooner or later.” They say exactly the opposite, that things happen “later or sooner.”

The Ortizes seemed content enough waiting an extra thirty or more minutes to climb back onto the hop-on, hop-off bus tour that promised to circulate every twenty minutes.

It was not just the distortion of time they experienced that day, the locations of “must-see” attractions were elastic as well.

The Museo de Frida Kahlo, for example, magically occupied two different locations on the tour map at the same time. Even the museum’s ticket taker was baffled. “Looks like a long walk from here” he explained, as he turned away the Ortizes who hadn’t reserved tickets in advance.

The Colombians walked back to the bus stop alongside a disappointed older couple from the U.S. who had made the same mistake.

The younger Ortiz, Elioct, seizing the opportunity to speak English, introduced each member of his family by name. The American, determined to use the language he studied, responded in his fingernails-on-the-chalkboard Spanish and as if by magic, a third language was created on fly.

They all hopped back onto the double decker, dodging decapitation by flowering Jacarandas and power cables. Back at the
Cibeles Fountain they exchanged URLs and email addresses.

Phenomena that happen routinely here in Coyoacán and neighboring barrios border on magic.

Guardian angels appear out of nowhere when visitors like the Ortizes are lost or locked out. Locals stop to help tourists like the Americans place phone calls when Verizon fucks them over.

And miracle of all miracles, serviceable WIFI is provided free to anyone strolling the streets and plazas of North America’s largest city.

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Child and dog Brothers K

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The kids have left home and the dog has gone to heaven.

For everything there is a season.

A time to reap, a time to sow. A time to bear children and adopt a rescue dog to teach them empathy. The season for orthodontists is followed by the season of U-Hauls and driving kids great distances to start their careers.

The sun cleared the Section-8 unit across the street as a guy inside our coffee shop watched a mother on the sidewalk playing a game with her son.

She would offer a banana which he refused with an exaggerated shake of the head, only to grab her hand and take a bite. It was his job to make his mother laugh.

The boy was a study in motion. At one point he’d rotated himself fully upside down in his stroller. He’d been hearing about this thing called an “indoor voice” and it occurred to him that being out there on the sidewalk, as outdoors as anybody can get, there was no limit to noise he could make.

For the man sitting inside, this was a opportunity to watch a child closely without fear of being falsely accused of something creepy.

He had made thousands of drawings of children during his career. The balance of their heads, the preverbal language of their hands, their examination of objects and that just-delivered newness continued to fascinate him.

A morning customer and her dog took the next table over and instantly the boy had planted himself on the pavement.

The scene played out exactly as scripted; dog begging for attention meets child being coaxed to pet him. Sooner or later there will be a four-legged sibling in this kid’s future.

The man watching all this unfold cherishes memories of the absolute, moment-to-moment closeness he shared with his own children decades ago.

And while he has no desire to relive those years, to see the seasons run backward, he never refuses the chance to hold someone’s baby in his arms when the opportunity is offered.

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Mom defending Dad (Copy of original)

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Despite the fact that he chewed tobacco, everyone in the family agreed he was swell.

Her brothers had brought him home from the glass factory to meet their sister. That was twenty years earlier.

He was a thrifty, hard-working, unassuming, church-going man and so they married.

He was good to their boys and except for penny-ante poker, he didn’t gamble. There were no women. But it turned out he was a ‘complicated’ man — at least that’s how the doctors described him.

He had lost his mother at fourteen and was raised as an only child by aunts who scorned his father and his religion. He could be heard shouting back at them decades after they died. He couldn’t lay them to rest.

As newlyweds, they were familiar with alcohol.

The young woman had her first drink during Prohibition (her father gave dances and could pick up and bounce two drunks at a time). Her husband-to-be had ran bootleg whisky out of an elevator in a downtown hotel.

By the time their second boy came, the man’s diary described how he and his crew carried hip-flasks while sorting mail on train cars. There was a photo of him bleary eyed during a labor event. He kept a circuit of distant taverns to hide his habit.

Alcohol and undetected diabetes tricked the chemicals in his brain. His outbreaks led doctors to prescribe electric-shock therapy, and the courts signed off. There was a fall from grace – nobody knew what to say.

Don’t stop reading.

It turns out that the man was as canny in choosing a mate as she had been in choosing him.

She refused to see her good and decent man as a damaged soul. She never wavered. She made sure her boys appreciated that their father, despite his afflictions, gave them full bragging rights.

The family held.

The man outlived his wife by about a year. There was beer in the house after she was gone but now it was ice cream he turned to for comfort. He kept Eskimo Pies in the freezer.fingerprint4-only-final-40px

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Carla’s painting of George Gerber (Copy of original)

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Being dead didn’t suit George Gerber. And, for George Gerber, being dead didn’t last long.

By all accounts here was a sociable man, a vibrant man, something of a character.

George had moved from New York at some point and wore a Yankee’s hat to prove it. He loved baseball and its traditions. “Now it’s just ‘money ball,’” he complained.

The man lived alone in a balconied condo building within easy distance of the coffee shop. No one recalls any mention of a wife or children.

George had spent his working years at the Internal Revenue Service. We don’t know for a fact, but we should assume IRS agent Gerber was kindly when auditing widows and orphans, and was passably competent at what he did.

George kept up with a stack of newspapers each day (there’s still an honest-to-God newsstand on the corner) and he happened to have the kind of face the Chicago readers of Nelson Algren or Studs Terkel would find comforting.

The portrait that Carla Hayden painted is sizable. She plied acrylic washes until she found the whimsy and panache of the man she enjoyed. When the piece was unveiled George predicted it would end up at the Art Institute.

After George left this earth Brian and John, owners of the Brothers K, afforded the work a position of honor near the double-urn brewing machine where, as you can see, George remains very much alive and with us today.

First-shift baristas report the hint of a frown on that painted face during pre-dawn hours. But it disappears as soon as the Brazilian, Papua New Guinean or Guatemalan coffee is brewed and George breathes in the caffeine he needs to face the day.

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