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After spending a day and a half digging through paperwork and getting everything sorted into our new filing cabinet I came across all kinds of things that sparked memories… both sad, sweet, and funny. I just had to post something I wrote this in 1997…. it won’t win any literary prizes, but it’s a part of our story and it makes me smile. I’ve copied it “as is” so please ignore grammatical errors 😉

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We would go to that tiny little coffee shoppe as often as we could. It was a place with red, yellow, green, and blue walls, tacky colored Christmas lights in the windows that were half falling down, there were wooden tables and chairs by one wall and barrels with coffee beans filled into burlap sacks on the other. They served the coffee in glasses, unless the waitress was tired and hung over that day and had pulled out the stack of paper cups.

On warm summer evenings they’d open the door to the backyard and we would sit between overgrown fences around plastic tables, with a few stars breaking through the smoggy night sky above us. We loved it there. We would talk for hours on end, tasting different flavored coffees, taking a few stops at the little restroom with no soap or papertowels, and talking until the day ran out of hours. We’d forget to eat all day. All we needed was two chairs, a table, coffee, and we were set.

Dreams are created in a place like the New York Coffee Exchange in Brooklyn. Our first apartment outlined and furnished on napkins. Our children’s names*, our hopes and dreams, worries and troubles. Nothing was too small or too big to be discussed when we had infinite hours and coffee to stay awake on. I remember so plainly the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the feeling of “our” cafe. No one knew it was ours but us. Not even the people who worked there. We kept to ourselves, minding our business. Other tables were filled with artists, musicians and students – people with the ability to stir up quite a brew of noise. It kept our conversations secret. It was safe.

We were not even going out at this stage of our relationship. We had already been going steady twice and I was quite determined not to be his until I was certain I truly loved him and would want to marry him. So we were just there. Two familiar strangers by a table trying to find the meaning of life and path of our future by the help of tacky lights, noisy people, colors and coffee. We found a common ground through the tales of our young lives over cappuccino and french vanilla coffee that fall of our twentieth year of life.

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* one of the names jotted down was: Julia Marie Miller! How about that!

Footnote: this was the fall of 1997. We got engaged May 1998 🙂