Since I experienced a moment of locational jealously in New York several years ago I have become obsessed with a local community coffee shop that finally opened this week. Mixed-use is considered a dirty word in American suburbia and a downright fantasy in the rural town with no stop lights where I grew up.
Everyone over the age of 50 laments the death of their main street. What was once a vibrant downtown full of pool halls, bars, and places for teenagers to do something other than mischief has largely evaporated in the greater American zeitgeist. Farmland has steadily been replaced by god-awful overpriced and underbuilt suburban houses from hell. Community only extends as far as the front porch- though I must stop and thank the good people of my former community who brought boxes over when we had to move because the neighborhood wasn't so friendly anymore. Good people still exist, though they are becoming increasingly outnumbered. This has to reverse course eventually.
My friend who lived in New York, and has since moved back, lived in a neighborhood in Queens with a bagel shop that put bulgogi and kimchi on their bagel sandwiches. I think about that place at least once a day. The space reserved for that sandwich in my daily recounting is rivaled only by thoughts of the Roman Empire. A coffee shop right down the road from him served Turkish coffee and I'll never forget the picture I took holding that little cup with a good friend. Now, its a terrible sin to wish anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon was more like New York, but I dream about feeling a community in action again.
Suburbia could do with a little community coffee shop. Open it at 6 a.m.- 5 if they're ambitious- and watch as the walls built everyone's little plot of land comes down. See if the time given to being suspicious of each other is instead spent learning more about one another. I'd pay more to live in a place like that. What could go wrong? A coffee shop can't possibly make more noise than a backyard barbeque, and besides that, whose gonna be loud in a coffee shop? Nobody has had their coffee yet.
Community matters and America has let men in suits living in cities hundreds of miles away dictate what shape our lives will take. Suburbia is considered the pinnacle of polite society, where everyone owns a house and spits out a couple of kids. That doesn't sound too bad at all, really, but why did we have to go and make it so bland? Drive-ways to nowhere occupied by large trucks they can't drive but feel like they have to have them. TV's turned to the news and the remotes gathering dust because they have to see it all, be told what to think about it, and get so mad at the conclusion of the stories they see and believe they crafted of their own accord that they shut the TV off in anger and go to bed. That's a different subject on its own, but imagine the difference in the morning if they had a little community coffee house.
My local shop made me a great mocha. You know what else? I had the best bagel I have ever had outside of New York made by a local bagel shop they partnered with. A community in action, working together.
Next thing you know there will be a community garden. Get enough vegetables, somebody get some meat from the Fresh Value, and a few old Southern women working the pot and now everybody's coming over for stew.
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