Youngs Bay Coffee Shop

I am sipping a fancy coffee from a backyard on a fine weekend morning. Youngs Bay barely moves in the background. Let’s call this place the Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. I like writing here, but not the ongoing coffee shop novel, which is a city novel, and I am not writing this from the city.

Tourists have descended upon the Oregon Coast. Doubtless another record year. It feels time for me to sell the house and leave. But where do I go? This question is consuming me. I have options, then I discover they’ve vanished.

Gulls, jays, crows, hummingbirds and doves fly around me. It is good to have coffee with them.

I think about some old friends who have recently returned to my life. I think back to all my coffee shop writing the last 33 years, even in Portland when Portland wasn’t a coffee town and not a single Starbucks was in Oregon. I think back to the people I met in coffee shops over the years. I used to love to visit the barista who later became my wife when she was working in downtown coffee shop. She was one of the Rose City’s original baristas and she mesmerized me with her beauty and grace behind the counter. She introduced me to good coffee, but I have since returned to Yuban and other cheap drip brands. I feel like I write better drinking cheap coffee, and even better when it’s leftover a day or two.

I am lucky to have Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. It has saved my soul more than once that past 18 months. Watching the actions of the intertidal is powerful medicine.

Is it too early or too late for morning brandy in the coffee? There is yard work to do later.

Here comes another customer, a great friend. He sits down next to me. His little speckled dog joins us, too. My friend and I begin to talk and the dog wants in on the conversation.

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