Coffee Shop Eavesdropping

I am sitting at a rickety table outside a coffee shop drinking coffee.

A table away, a grad student from my nearby alma mater confers with her professor about her thesis.

I eavesdrop and hear…”mobility studies, ethnography, points of intersection, percolating up, paradigms…”

Blah, blah, blah. Gobbledygook. Jargon. Dead language.

The grad students parrots it back to the professor.

I am so glad I didn’t pursue the academic life.

It is overcast. I smell coffee beans roasting. A homeless woman across the street smokes a cigarette and drinks three different cups of coffee.

I am thinking about a eulogy I have to write for a man who is about ready to die, a man who holds the title of the greatest storyteller I have encountered in Oregon Tavern Age country, a man with an exclusive Ernest Hemingway suicide story that I got down in print and should make available to Hemingway scholars, if there are any left in America.

I’ve never written a eulogy before. My dad has delivered hundred of them and gave me the lowdown on the genre.

I’m attacking on all writing fronts—the homeless, a short story about Fish Creek, blog posts, letters, a novel set in the mid 90s, prepping to edit a memoir of a long lost, deceased Oregon writer who was last published in 1972 in an anthology of creative writing written by inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary.

I live for these resurrections of long gone Oregon stories and writers. There’s been a lot of that over the years. I think I prefer it to my own writing.

I looked at some used RVs the other morning. I have a fever to buy and older model and retrofit it to create the perfect creative and living space for me. Are their any Time Life books how to do this? One 1995 one-owner beauty is named Calista Cove. I like the alliteration of that name.