Rain Coffee Shop Notes

Rain threatens outside the Christian coffee shop. It’s a hip Christian coffee shop—Aerosmith is playing.

Three college students sip fancy drinks and discuss their recent failures in class.

World Series highlights play silently on television. Baseball seems to be dying before our eyes. Computers are murdering it, making it inhumane. As a kid, I never much liked playing it. Too static. Too much standing around.

The shop has a set of World Books, the sort of Google of its day. Every family owned a set and every kid used it for school reports. My mom still displays the red-colored set from my youth. It’s so old that Robert F. Kennedy isn’t even dead.

A few tables away, a female pastor counsels a female parishioner. She uses her phone to read soothing scriptures.

A novel was recently published. It’s about how nobody reads anymore and everyone plays video games. It will be a novel nobody reads because its intended readership doesn’t read—it plays video games.

Rain is picking up. I long for a cozy place to read a World Book encyclopedia at random and learn something old. In my next home, I want a set from the 1970s. I want Nixon out of office and the Democrats in control of all three branches of government. They used to be able to do that.