For some 38 years during the summer, give or take a few days here and there, I had breakfast with the same group of men. The local coffee shop was our meeting place. It was my morning routine.
Our group included an advertising specialties salesman who spent his days selling any product that he could print your name on, but his primary goal each day was to play golf. There was a former butcher who lost his job when the local market closed. He became an insurance salesman … still a butcher in some people’s minds. Another owned a carpet-cleaning business that he bought when his former job, hanging wallpaper, disappeared when wallpaper went out of favor. There was a retired art director and me, an itinerant artist and teacher. As with all groups of this type, we would solve the world’s problems by 9:00 am and be off to our regular activities. That was our routine.
Blanche, the waitress, was a cantankerous woman who would have our coffee or muffin waiting when we arrived, knowing what we wanted because none of us varied from our morning routine. If we did, she would scold you up one side and down the other. You had wasted her time and messed up her morning routine.
After retirement and returning home to our village, I anticipated a new routine of crawling out of bed and walking across the street to the local coffee shop, affectionally known as the “Wind Tunnel,” to continue solving the world’s problems with a new group of friends. Alas, the Wind Tunnel closed the very week I retired. They must have heard I was coming.
My summer morning routine would be restored with a short drive to the town wharf for coffee at the seasonal food emporium, appropriately nicknamed “the slip.” A new batch of ever-changing, coffee-sipping companions emerged.
One day there might be a retired plumber or an engineer. Another day a former federal agent, a marathon winner, a retired flagpole installer, a skydiver, a world traveler and occasionally, someone of the female persuasion would show up … and me. An eclectic group indeed. My new routine was established … until fall.
Fall brings cooler temperatures, falling leaves and the removal of our favorite coffee spot, literally driven away for winter storage like all the boats in the harbor. This year this change has generated much discussion as to where our little group will gather for our daily java fix. In years past, we didn’t see anyone during the long winter. Time to change that.
The routine of meeting in the morning is not unprecedented. When my father ran the village barber shop, a band of locals … a laborer, a fisherman, a doctor, a fireman, a politician, and others would gather in his shop to resolve local disputes and kibitz. They called themselves the Professional Loafers Club, the PLC. It was their routine. Today it is well known that the Republicans routinely meet at the local bakery and the Democrats too. There is the ladies’ group who have their own reserved table and still others who meet at the nearby diner.
Our group doesn’t have a name, but the consensus was that we needed to gather in the winter, at least from time to time, lest we forget each other’s name come spring. So, meet we do. The plumber is there and the world traveler, the flagpole installer and the skydiver who has yet to retire even at his advanced age, a representative of the fair sex … and me.
The routine lives on.
Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.
Thoughts on …
By Dick Morgado