Barbara J. Hamby

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Coffee Run

This morning I was too lazy to make coffee and, besides, when I thought of it, the dishwasher was already running with the Mr. Coffee carafe in it. So I decided to stop at the little coffee shop on the King City mini-mall. After I showered and dressed, I checked the time and place of the T.O.P.S. meeting I planned to attend and learned that it was on Thursday, and not Tuesday, as I had thought.

All dressed down (in the lightest weight clothing I could find) and with no place to go, I got in the car and headed to the coffee shop. I remembered the nice young couple who were running it the last time I’d been there and looked forward to seeing them. Alas, alack, the tiny store now has a partition to close off the lottery machines (poker, I guess) that I could barely see through the smoke. A pleasant Mexican woman and child were behind the counter. I bought my coffee and took it to a table outside to drink. It was a bit chilly for that this August morning. A “Help Wanted” sign in the window stood out. Prospective employees should probably be warned about the dangers of working in heavy smoke.

Recently there’s been a lot of publicity about second-hand smoke. A friend in Vancouver, who had never smoked, died of lung cancer a few years ago. The woman on the television commercial, who never smoked but waited tables in smoky restaurants most of her life, died several months ago. Our Sunday newspaper carried the obituary of a musician who died of lung cancer at age 55. He had stopped smoking twenty years ago, but performed in smoky bars. The latter case is the most frightening to me, the mother of a jazz musician who has never smoked, but breathed his father’s smoke for many years, and the smoke in bars and restaurants where he has appeared since he was a teenager.

Stepping off my soapbox, I’ll report on the store next door to the coffee shop. They sell two different items that appear to be strange bedfellows (pun intended). Billiard tables are lined up for sale on one side and mattresses on the other. One-stop shopping to furnish a bachelor apartment, I suppose. I had to chuckle when passing by because the sight brought to mind a fellow I dated briefly after my first marriage ended. He was an engineer at Boeing, whose boat was in dry dock on the Duwamish River. I’m not sure why, but he slept on a worktable in a building near where his boat was being repaired. I never shared that bed, so don’t know if there was a mattress on it or not. I didn’t offer to share my bed with him, either, that’s why we dated briefly. It always amazes me when an unusual sight triggers a buried memory such as that.