People At A Coffee Shop

The long forced march is behind them.

The couple seated at the table are about to harvest what they have sown. They’re giddy with achievement and release.

They’ve done it. They’ve nailed it. Totally aced it. They have tee-shirts as evidence of every function they’ve endured as students.

For one of them the immediate future involves tenure track at one of the Ivies; for the other an individually tailored portfolio of responsibilities within an international consulting firm —all of this due to years of work. And now even the gods of relocation have smiled on them — neither will need to sacrifice a career for the other.!

They’ll move to the East Coast within months. As they sit here today, they’re comparing the advantages of towns that triangulate their workplaces.

The young couple has been a part of our community for six years and has discovered that something as incidental as a coffee joint can shape the quality of life in a way few people would imagine.

There’s a reason their names and faces aren’t revealed in this post. Halfway around the world there are families and clans and religions that keep their distance from one another. A ethnic Kurd and an ethnic Armenian, a Muslim and a Christian, are not meant to be together.

Here at our coffee shop, at the most visible table in the center of the room, the man and the women don’t need to hide their troth.

They’ll tell you as a matter of fact that their decision of where to live next, together as a family, revolves at least in part around finding a coffee shop like this one.

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.