Only at Glimmer’s Cafe
A smiling man topped by a straw hat hopped into my sightline as I unslung my backpack to sit down at Glimmer’s Cafe. From his opening apology for interrupting me, to his long unbroken monologue about engineering, philosophy, and illustrating the human face, to his cheery apology and sidling back to his own table, he enriched whatever-the-hell I had been thinking about as I sat down, which was nothing but empty anticipation. I came here looking for language, and Smiley talked to me nearly a half hour. What a great guy. Then gave me his card and left me flailing again.
Discovering a new extrovert is a luxury. Thanks be to him. Now he’s back at his own table. I’ve been seeking pockets of words my whole life. Usually I find dialects of language in my workplaces, whether in clothing, truck driving, cooking, teaching, hospital psych unit, or the U.S. Postal Service, I have to work hard to find dialects. While typing typos in the sentence above, I slipped into Croatian curses picked up from a lady I once looked after. You get it from here and there, and I worry that in retirement I’ll lose it all, like the buried stitch in the Daniel Day-Lewis film, The Phantom Thread.
I had just come to this trusty cafe from trying out a fancy coffee shop. Six dollar coffee. Five dollar bun. Tasted fantastic, but was terrible. Big new windows set in black window frames, bumping music, cement floor, screwed-down tables, and a chilly back patio with wooden benches. This cafe has a chilly back patio with benches. But whatever that place lacked, and it’s probably doing everything right, this place has. The shmancy joint also had its coterie of friendly gray men in baseball caps jostling with undergrads. This joint is packed nearly from open to close.
Fancy Coffee can’t compete with Glimmer’s Cafe. Only at Glimmer’s Cafe will a guy sidle up to you and ask, with smiles and deference, if it’s not too much a bother, about your writing equipment — he looked like Clarence the angel on It’s A Wonderful Life — and then share about his writing equipment, its iteration, the brilliance of older machines, their engineering, and then segue into philosophy, and the theory of self portraiture over centuries. In my flusterment I spilled my drink and went running for a napkin, came back, and he helped me spot off my sweater. Then he continued on, talking about cognition, language, and emotion in quadrants of the human face, and the development of mirrors since 1600, using polished steel, then convex glass and blown silver powder.
Pretty great, this guy. But chance meetings only occur with this promise at Glimmer’s. Not at Fancy Coffee with the bolted-down tables. No one makes eye contact there. At Glimmer’s, chat seems a prerequisite, an expectation. You’re as liable to cross paths with young tatted-up coeds as college professors, dog walkers, homeless and mentally fragile. While some come on a mission to disarm the bourgeoisie, and smash the state over a cup of coffee, it seems that forbears have also tried that and failed in 2016, 2013, 2008, 1997, and 1989, but Glimmer Cafe keeps on. How?
If a cafe is going to survive, it has to outlast multiple stormings of its walls. It has to survive revolution. It seems that Glimmer Cafe will not negotiate with terrorists.
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