At the Bridge

The coffeehouse is here. Yes! Bridge 281 opened for its first Friday night and we got to be there. It seems like something we've all been waiting for for a long time...a place to come and be, to drink coffee and visit and pretend we're European or something (I'm not sure if that's actually a European thing to do, but it sounds like it to me.)

There isn't a clock there, and that makes me happy. It's like the saying the Russians have that "happy people don't have watches." Freedom from schedule is something were starving for just under the surface, but we're just so enslaved to time here...and I have a hard time giving up schedule too.

I stood around drinking my Chesterton, and talked with Bailey (its so delightful to have an unexpected conversation with a friend you didn't expect to see about pieces of life you love...it was a good coffeehouse moment, I think, perched on a tall chair at a tall, smooth green table under somewhat dim lights...it started raining out the window, and I fidgeted with an unlit votive candle and its holder as our conversation waxed and waned.

So. As silly as it may sound, I'm a little nervous about the coffee shop. How do you "be" in a coffee shop...kind of an inhabiting sort of hanging out...very akin to "fellowship" with a touch of sophistication that I'm totally at a loss about, living in the part of the country I live in. I have an unsettlingly small amount of coffee-know...(I do know what a latte is, and thankfully Bridge 281 is really down to earth...none of the Starbucksy "talls" and "ventes" to worry about!) I would like to be posh, but I'm don't know how, and imitated poshness disgusts me-- especially in myself! Isn't the coffeehouse supposed to be about sharing lives and being real, not about being something you aren't? Right. And besides, the kingdom of God is not posh.