strike that

Wednesday Morning, 5 a.m.

At five it’s just the truckers on the road – trash trucks and delivery trucks banging by me, on the sidewalk, headed for the bus stop. Last night at one the rain against my window woke me, and I realized my plan to bike to Celia’s this morning needed a Plan B, so I opened my laptop in the dark and found the bus schedule. Then I woke up every twenty minutes until 4:45, certain that I’d overslept.

The streets are empty but the bus is half-full, and it stops every other block to pick up folks huddled in the shadowy shelters. It’s still dark at five on a Portland morning, even in May.

I get off at Sandy and walk eight blocks east under my umbrella. I used to loathe umbrellas. When I lived in New York umbrellas represented so much of what drove me away: expensive haircuts and dry-clean-only wardrobes and not sharing space. Eight million people frantic with keeping themselves dry, even though it meant shoving metal spikes into the eyes of everyone else. We’re all allowed to be hyperbolic and self-righteous in college, right?

But now I live in Portland, and I love umbrellas. The umbrella lets me take long long walks in the beautiful northwest rain and still arrive fit to serve coffee. It does not make me hot like a raincoat, and it is not some two hundred dollar status symbol of camping credibility. An umbrella is not gear. An umbrellas is simple and effective and poetic.

At Celia’s I unlock the door and turn on the lights and say Good Morning as I always do, and I start the burners under the teapots. I grind three kinds of coffee for French pressing and I fill the cream pitcher and the soy milk pitcher and the water pitcher, the last with ice and three slices of cucumber. On mornings that are stressful or sleepy I plug in the radio. Today I plug it in.

Celia’s is steamy and fragrant and full of good sounds – the whistling kettles and the grinding beans and the beeping of the press timer. Bev arrives at six fifteen and I take out the café tables and bring in the fresh pile of Willamette Weeks and place the stools in front of the counter. I pull open the blinds and spread the Oregonian out on a table and I flip the switch for the neon sign that flashes Open in blue and red.

And then there are customers, fabulous customers ordering three shot Americanos in a twelve ounce cup or nonfat vanilla lattes or Mexican mochas no whip, but I can’t begin to talk about them here. Each of them would take an hour at least to tell you about: she gets Coke with her bagel, he brings coffee back to his wife home with the new babies, she looks happy and peaceful and hopeful, every morning.

And hours later Bev gives me spoiling bananas for banana bread and soup for my housemates and cookies that didn’t sell, and I walk home in a shower that turns into a hailstorm, thunder and wind and ice falling from the sky, so that my jeans are soaked to my knees and my Docs are leaking and car alarms are going off around me. And I am glad for my warm morning. (And my umbrella.)

posted by tortaluga @ 8:03 PM