Hooked On Coffee Shops

The idea of sitting around somewhere drinking coffee goes way back in my life. I mean way, way back. To Opa-Locka when I was only two and my mother and I would visit her friend Betty a few doors down. All three of us would sit around the kitchen table drinking instant coffee (mine mostly milk). But for a large part of my childhood, the coffee drinking experience faded in importance. Until the time my father signed the two of us up for one of those New-Age-type self improvement seminars that seemed to be everywhere in the seventies. It was October 1972, and the seminar was being held at the Marriott Hotel near the Miami International Airport. During the seminar, there would be breaks between the presentations, and my father and I would often go down to the lobby to sit around the restaurant bar there and drink some coffee. And that experience stuck very, very deeply within me as a strong, vivid, positive thing.

Once I moved to Gainesville in 1977, sitting out and drinking coffee became almost second nature to me, and it has stayed with me to this day. A few years ago, I purchased a very sturdy, portable word processor called AlphaSmart that runs on AA batteries seemingly forever, and have been going out, drinking coffee, and writing on it ever since. As a matter of fact, I’m doing it now!

Since 2000, Gainesville’s coffee shop picture has been increasingly dominated by the Starbucks chain, which I believe now has more than ten stores in town. I prefer flavor-roasted coffee, which Starbucks regrettably doesn’t market as a brewed product. Bookstores Books-a-Million and Borders do provide flavor-roasted coffee at their cafés. There are several other competing coffee shops in town as well.

But of course I really don’t need to go to a specialty place for coffee. A Krispy Kreme Donut shop (minus the “donuts”) will do quite well, as will any fast-food place like McDonalds or Burger King. And I’ve also learned that just brewing some of my own coffee at home and bringing it out on my front porch can often produce the same “coffee shop” effect for me!