Idle essays

Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB rounded up another blue-collar dude as a guest contributor, who tells a funny story. Along the way he describes searching for a coffee shop and ending up having to settle for a Starbucks, a place where both the coffee and the clientele were jarringly overpriced. Ron’s mention of this episode came literally just a few hours after some friends of mine, true old-Phoenix folks, invited me to breakfast at a favorite hangout of theirs, a real honest-to-God neighborhood coffee shop.

When they asked me to meet them in darkest Sunnyslope, one of those lock-your-car-doors parts of town, I was given pause. However, we’d have a man along (albeit an 80-something man…wonder if he packs heat?). So, bright and early it was off to breakfast at the Eye Opener Café.

Talk about your blast from the past! It’s a real, genuine roadside coffeeshop, the sort of place every small town and wide spot in the road used to have, and that, in bigger cities, used to grace every neighborhood. The wall-sized (incredibly high-E) windows gazing out onto the passing traffic, the Naughyde-upholstered booths with the Formica tabletops, the 1970s green Formica cabinet in behind the cash register, the amiably blowzy blue-jean-clad waitress, and best of all, the locals!

It used to be you’d go to one of these places around breakfast-time and find it full of guys in khakis or jeans and workshirts, all of them chewing more metaphorical fat than bacon: solving the problems of the world (and along the way sharing a fair amount of town gossip) before heading out to the jobsite. The Eye Opener had a bunch, most of them gray of hair and beard.

Reminded me of a place I used to visit, oh…40, 45 years ago, also in Sunnyslope. It was an old Dunkin Donuts.

We owned a ranch outside of Yarnell, up above the Rim. Two or three times a week, I’d drive up there, usually to meet a friend there, grab a horse and just be gone all day long. It was only about a 90-minute trip, once you got beyond the Phoenix traffic. In those days—and still, I’m told—Dunkin’ had the best coffee of any fast-food joint. So as I headed out, I’d stop at the Dunkin’ in Sunnyslope to grab a cup of coffee and a doughnut to sustain life during the drive.

The place was always full of old-timers and working men, and every time you’d go in there, you’d overhear some entertaining snippet of local news. It was great.

Probably they were there because by that time Sunnyslope was getting a shade blighted and any coffee shops that might have existed there were long gone. So they were forced to have recourse to a chain.

In due time, the Dunkin’ closed, too, presumably done in by Cinnabons and those icky Krispy Kreme things. Bad taste drives out good, so they say. 😉 It was replaced by a shop from some other chain, whose owners did not understand the concept of “coffee.”

My mother and I used to frequent a coffee shop in San Francisco, not far from my junior high school. San Francisco being what it is, the food was pretty good: a hamburger had real meat in it: ground round in hand-formed patties, and you could get it cooked to order. “Rare” meant deep pink, verging on red. Order “very rare” and you were apt to get something like beef tartare. The bread was thick slices of real sourdough, toasted to perfection on a greasy grill, and the French fries were actual potatoes cut up in the restaurant and cooked to order. Delicious!

But that was the exception. We dined our way from coffee shop to coffee shop across the country on the several times we traversed America, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco and back. Typically the food was much like what you’d find in a Denny’s today: ranging from pretty bad to just OK. Your best bet was to buy things that were hard to ruin: ham and scrambled eggs for breakfast, a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, meat loaf for dinner.

That was about the story for our Sunnyslope discovery. It’s hard to ruin a pancake made from a packaged mix, for example (it can be done, but the short-order cook has to work at it), so that’s what I asked for. The blueberry pancake that came out was a little soggy, probably because the berries hadn’t been mixed into the batter but tossed on the grill and then the stock pancake batter poured over them. The bacon was very good: crisp but not burnt. The coffee was passable, a cut above Circle K’s.

Maybe the quality of the food explains the swift extinction of the ubiquitous greasy spoon when the horrid McDonald’s and its ilk came on the scene. If you’re going to eat mediocre food, why wait for it when you can drive past a window and pick it up without ever getting out of your car?

Too bad. We lost a crucial piece of Americana when we abandoned the local coffee shop. As Ron, the guest author at Blue Collar Workman, points out, a Starbucks ain’t no coffee shop. The atmosphere is unwelcoming—in fact, all that echoing hard-edged plastic decor was specifically designed to discourage people from sitting around and talking at length—the food is ridiculous, and the coffee that underlies the sticky confections they sell as drinks is akin to battery acid. Why anyone would want to go there beats me.

When Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks, he spoke to an American vernacular experience that anyone who grew up in this country during the mid-twentieth century would instantly know. The sights, sounds, smells, and flavors of such a place were part of our culture. Probably the greatest value of such places was that they gave us a place to hang out, shoot the breeze, and get to know each other.

Where do you hang out today? Can you hear each other talk there?

Images:

Nighthawks. Edward Hopper. Link to Wikipedia file.
Dunkin’ Donuts shop in Geneva, New York. N-Lange.de. GNU Free Documentation License.

At last the funny little tractor-seated plastic and chrome stool arrived from Amazon.com. I have to ask you, is this cute or not?

It’s purple!

My latest scheme is to get out of the desk chair, which I believe aids and abets some extraordinarily self-destructive habits (not the least of which is spending too damn many hours in front of the computer). I’ve been perching on one of those little wooden stools you can get in waypoints like Walmart and Target, whose legs my son cut down to make it the right height. This has helped some with the back pain, by making it very difficult to slouch and pretty easy to sit up straight.

However, the wooden stool, with its flat, excessively firm disk-shaped seat, is a little hard on the rear end. The proposed solution to that was one of those padded rolling stools of the sort dentists and manicure technicians use. Amazon has those, too…but if you look up “stools” on that hegemonic site, up comes this little guy. Purple (“violet,” in advertisingese) is not his only guise: he comes in 12 colors, including staid black and the spritely white.

Several retailers are peddling these at Amazon, at a wide variety of prices. I found one for $35, so figured…hey! if it doesn’t work out, nothing much will be lost. The same manufacturer makes one with a minimalist back, too.

It’s very cheaply made, but it has a kind of Ikea appeal. I figure if this plan doesn’t work and I can’t get comfortable on the thing, I’ll have to buy one of those ugly ergonomic chairs in the Herman Miller vein. One way or another, this contraption isn’t likely to last long, and so I’ll need to replace it with something.

If this idea it does work and I end up liking it and not having my back hurt, then for the same amount one would pay for some designer’s hideous dystopic nightmare, I can get a beautiful hand-crafted Thos. Moser stool, one that decidedly will not fall apart during my lifetime. Or my son’s. Or my grandchildren’s.

Thos. Moser will make these things at any height that will seat you comfortably at your desk.

They have no casters, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately, for their looks. It is good, in an office (home or otherwise), to be able to roll around. However, for Thos. Moser, I could learn to live a casterless life.

Something weird happens as you get older: time itself goes faster and faster.

You don’t believe me? You will. It’s a law of nature: the passage of time accelerates as you draw nearer to the end of your life.

I first noticed this as I was approaching middle age, probably in my early thirties. It struck me that when I was a kid, an hour seemed like an eternity. That was one reason why, when offered a choice of whether or not to take piano lessons, I inadvisedly declined: the whole hour the neighbor kid had to spend every day at practice filled my little heart with horror. By the age of 30, an hour felt like a half-hour, barely enough time to get anything done.

Now that I’m old, an hour passes in a minute, sometimes even a second. It goes by unnoticed. Day by day, there’s never enough time to get through all the things I want or need to do.

Yesterday SDXB remarked that he’d been in the Sun City house almost ten years. He moved out of the neighborhood shortly after I moved into my present home. How can that be? I couldn’t possibly have lived here an entire decade!

It confirms what one of my former graduate assistants said the other day. She’d checked in from the Midwest to say she was applying for a swell new job and could use a recommendation. She’s now a mother about to enter her second marriage, working in a publishing house. “I can hardly believe it’s been ten years since I started at GDU,” she said.

Ten years? It hasn’t even been ten months, kid!

But no. I moved into this house at the same time I moved over to GDU’s main campus to found the editorial office that employed her. If SDXB moved to Sun City ten years ago, then she went to work for me ten years ago, and indeed, I bought my present house ten years ago.

SDXB reflected that he and his former wife married over 50 years ago. My ex-DH and I would have been married 45 years this December, had I not run away to the Outback.

What does this have to do with you young pups and your money? A lot.

Before you know it, you’ll be old. At that point, only a few moments will remain in your life, or so it will seem to you. The relativity of time makes it seem like old age is a long way off. But it’s not.

For your money, it means…

• Plan early and often for retirement.
• Start saving for the future now.
• Even if you’re just starting, save more than the standard amount toward retirement.
• Put savings in several instruments: a 401(k) or 403(b) if your employer matches contributions, or if not, your own standard IRA; a Roth IRA; and ordinary brokerage accounts. Use non-tax-deferred instruments as well as deferred.
• Pay off the roof over your head as quickly as you can.

For the quality of your life it means…

• Do not waste your life in a job you hate. If you’re unhappy on the job, search for other work.
• Make a plan, one that will guide you in the direction of contentment, if not security. But do not marry your plan—stay flexible and open to new opportunities and ideas.
• Get yourself educated in something that will open the door into reasonably un-obnoxious work. Happiness is more important than money, on the job as well as in your personal life.
• Take care of your health. Eat well, exercise, and spend time in activities you find pleasurable.
• Free yourself, to the extent possible, of the toxic people and situations in your life.
• Engage in altruism. The people who are happiest in their careers have relatively low-paying jobs that help others—members of the clergy rank number one in job satisfaction. If you can’t help others for a living, do it as a volunteer.

Enjoy it while you’ve got it.

In a good way, not just in the negative way that phrase usually connotes.

Yesterday afternoon the phone rings. It’s the guy whose company installed all those sliding doors and the window I ordered up after the late, great garage invasion. After the work they’d done, installing some very nice improvements at a comparatively reasonable price, I wrote a rave review at Angie’s List. The boss didn’t notice this until a couple of days ago, when Angie’s called to hit him up for more money (yes…people pay to be listed at that site) and mentioned that he had a couple of reviews to check. When he saw what I’d written about his company, he was beside himself with joy. Called to thank me profusely (?? I’m the one who was lucky to find this outfit!) and invited me, free of charge, to an upcoming BNI meeting.

That, he said, would give me a chance to introduce myself and hand my cards around.

Mwa ha ha! We’ll need to get our brochure printed between now and then. BNI meets at the same time one of my classes meets this semester, so it’ll have to wait until after fall classes end. But this will be a nice opportunity.

And speaking of the merry-go-round, 101 Centavos not only linked to both Adjunctorium and Funny about Money in this week’s round-up, he also generously highlighted one of my recent rants at Adjunctorium, along with a cri de coeur by a young anthropology Ph.D. that appeared at Al Jazeera.

A couple of naive comments at Centavos’ site led me to publish another rant this morning, about the specious theory that teaching is somehow “rewarding” in a metaphorical sense. Where on earth do people get ideas like that?

Image: Larry Pieniazek, View of the Grand Carousel at Kennywood. GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.