The Mom & Pop coffee and tea shop is where it’s at, if you want my opinion.
Maybe the song is right: What the world needs now / is love, sweet love. Love is wonderful. I’m a huge fan of love. But hear me out: Love can be complicated and fraught. Love can bring us together, then turn right around and tear us apart. There’s a song about love for almost any situation, and they’re not all good.
Perhaps what the world needs now is the pure, uncomplicated, not-at-all-fraught simplicity of a locally owned coffee and tea shop. I’m talking about a place with curtains on the windows and a soft, slightly misshapen couch in some indescribable color, with throw pillows squishy enough to bunch up under your elbow to support your coffee arm.
You can keep your chain coffee shop with a long line of customers in stiff business suits, impatiently waiting for their Venti Half-Caf 2-pump caramel macchiato, extra hot. You don’t even want to be around when the caffeine hits their already amped-up bloodstream.
When anxiety about — well, everything — is swirling around our feet, threatening to throw us off balance, we have to hang on to the rituals that bring us peace.
If given the chance, seek out a coffee shop with plants in the windows and real cups that get washed and dried and returned to the shelf again and again. Find a place where the barista knows the names of the regulars and freely doles out puppuccinos for four-legged visitors.
These charming coffee shops have homemade baked goods wrapped in cellophane and displayed in baskets. Tins of loose-leaf tea line up like soothing sentinels beside the cash register. A place like this, unhurried and uncomplicated, has the potential to be a core value: in my life certainly, but perhaps for the entire human race. I walk into a place like this and expect to see art by local school children displayed on the walls. There’s a little shelf in the corner where a woman named Sue sells handmade vegan soaps, or Jessica offers hand painted greeting cards of local landscapes.
If we are who I think we are, we must see to it that these last bastions of humanity stay at the center of our afternoons. We can give ourselves permission to stop what we’re doing and put it on pause for a momentary change of pace. Let’s normalize seeking out a quiet little spot to go to meet a friend or sit alone with a good book as we sip slowly on a drink that warms us from the inside.
Sitting in one of these shops on a quiet afternoon, you might be rewarded by some juicy bits of gossip from a neighbor. Coffee shop tables are harbingers of advice from an old friend. Take a new acquaintance for a sit-down with warm mugs in your hands and your seedling of a friendship gets turbo-boosted by virtue of giving it time and space to grow and bloom.
As much as I love coffee, none of this is really about the coffee. It’s about the sunlight streaming through the windows. It’s about the family portrait of stick figures hanging on the wall, rendered in Crayola and Sharpie. Sue’s vegan soaps perfume the air with essential oils and shea butter. It’s the notion that there is a safe space somewhere for us, inviting us to slow down and stay awhile.
