The neighborhood Starbucks serves as my office these days. It’s got an internet connection, a place to sit for a couple hours, and it’s there when I need it, out of mind when I don’t.
I walk in and pull a bottled Mocha Frappucino out of the refrigerator case. I call these “the gas station mochas,” because they sell the same thing at gas station convenience stores. I started buying them because they’re the cheapest thing in the store, $1.85 and you can hog a table for hours without feeling guilty. I suppose I could upgrade to a more expensive, custom-made drink now, but it’s become habit.
Plus, I enjoy pulling the perforated plastic seal off the top, trying to get it in one smooth pull so I don’t have a bunch of tiny plastic scraps sitting around. It’s a little game I like to play each morning.
My favorite table is available, a small round table pushed up against one of the walls. It’s big enough for one, too small for two. I take a seat, enjoying the fact that at a regular coffee joint you have anonymity when you want it, familiar faces when you don’t.
As I sit there waiting for my computer to boot up, I stare out the window, dreaming, eyes fixated on something but seeing nothing. For some reason, I get lost in the memory of my first car, a beige Volkswagen, bought for $800 from an elderly couple in Mabton, a small town in Washington State.
A year or two after I got that Volkswagen, I moved onto something else, and I gave the car to my dad. He ran it until the engine blew up along a two-lane highway in Eastern Washington. He got a friend to pick him up and then he put an ad in the paper: “Abandoned car on Highway 24, the car is free if you’ll take it away.”
He tells me that a couple years later, he saw that same car, revived and tooling around the backroads again. Now, over twenty years later, I imagine that if I drove around that part of the state long enough, I’d still see it.
My computer beeps to tell me it finished booting up, so I reluctantly reenter the present and begin my day.