People At A Coffee Shop

People at a coffee shopThe morning’s short, impromptu memorial service was all the more moving for being unplanned and unscripted.

Linnea and Ian stopped in to introduce Tristan to the coffee shop that Linnea and her father loved.

Her father is gone, she told me. We spent a moment sharing what that loss means. Ian’s father had died as well, so the birth of Tristan was providential.

Linnea and her sister Jordan grew up with Neil. On the mornings when she could sleep in, she’d wander down past the couple doors to our corner coffee shop to greet her father.

He would already have spent hours with the likes of Joyce, Dickens, Austen, Faulkner, Flaubert, Stevens, and Eliot. Neil was a published poet himself and he used literature to explain “life’s greatest treasures and worst vices” to his daughters.

Neil Lukatch taught people to think. He was much sought after as a tutor for ACTs, LSATs and personalized learning strategies. (This from a guy who owned a comic-book store?)

When Neil and I got to know each other, we discovered that Linnea and my son were friends from high school and that Neil had tutored Ben.

Our friendship was built around the hamburger. Scouring suburbs for the best of the best provided the perfect guy excuse for two old men to make plans and get out of the house.

More than anything else we talked about being fathers. We liked to think that meeting our paternal responsibilities to the best of our ability would make up for our wild years.

To my blog’s question of “What’s the most important thing your father taught you?” Neil sent this: “How to love a child! There isn’t even a close second best.” He passed that wisdom on to Linnea.

The table where he liked to sit is now often claimed by a fascinating guy who reads and rereads the same impenetrable works of literature that Neil dedicated his life to. He is not Neil.

People at a coffee shopThe decor of our corner coffee shop screams a healthy disdain for tidiness and convention.

Its owner is either a genius at creating a welcoming underground, counterculture ambiance – the kind of space that retail designers charge tens of thousands to come up with – or he’s simply a bro who doesn’t give a shit.

There’s paint peeling around those enormous windows. Vintage floor tiles are cracked and gaping. There’s no effort to hide exposed conduits in the walls. An invisible film of neglect covers every surface.

Having said all that, the joint runs like a precision time piece. Service is crisp and friendly, lines short. The ugly dispenser of tap water is almost never empty. Customers double park and pick up orders fast enough to avoid parking tickets.

The place is an incubator for remote gig-workers, creatives, small LLC owners and university rats who set up shop and stay for hours. The energy is electric.

A room full of tattoos, piercings, pony tails, hipster knit caps and splashes of florescent hair offer you an opportunity for self-renewal. Osmosis on the cheap. Forget that trek through Nepal. Who needs Burning Man?

All you need do is sit quietly with a cup of coffee, breathe in the vapors and it WILL happen. When you’re in the moment, you’ll connect with a freer, looser, hipper, preservative-free version of your authentic self.

But fear not, wild thing, the minute you step out that door, you’ll return to the person your life choices and your dependents need you to be.

People at a coffee shopJohn is notorious as a cheapskate when to comes to spending other people’s money.One of the regulars at our corner coffee shop is busy knocking on his neighbors’ doors.

He’s running to replace a council member, Melissa Wynn, who after twenty-eight years of service is retiring from the city council of this small, suburban community .

The village has been John’s home for four decades. He and his wife raised their children there, educating them in the public schools.

John’s three business start-ups created jobs throughout the community. He’s known for his decades of volunteering; establishing, funding, serving as a member and presiding over non-profit organizations.

Never timid about offering well-articulated, alternative ideas to the powers that be, civic commitment seem to be part of his DNA.

Few have John Kennedy’s knowledge of past civic initiatives and policy shifts. Time and again his town (like municipalities everywhere) has assumed that simply spending additional taxpayer dollars would solve problems that remain as challenges to this day. He believes the budget should be balanced without raising taxes.

Affordability, transportation, diversity, equity and the environment are more important to this community than most. And John agrees with those goals.

But the basis of his campaign is that they can only be achieved when city government is dogged in finding less expensive and more sensible solutions to its challenges, in protecting the families invested in it.