The Five Mile Rule

This is round two about my favorite “third place” in the Pacific Northwest.  It was written just before we moved to KS.–LA

May 23, 2003

Written at the Mukilteo Coffee Company in Mukilteo Washington.

I am going to miss this “third place” where I am writing today. This café is amazing for its gaggles of dusty-feathered senior citizens who cluster here every Monday morning. No one ever seems to order more than a cup of coffee (I use that term generically, Northwest-style, to stand for all types of coffee drinks, from Espressos to Granitas) and a bee-crumpet, you know, bagel, banana bread, or biscotti. Occasionally, when young couples file in with hip Ichiro glasses, backpacks, and baseball caps I can see the surprise of the next generation on their fresh faces.

Is there any other coffee shop on the Sound that shelters so many old people? Seven of the most ancient ones crowd around a beat-up round oak table that looks as if it belongs in an antique auction barn rather than in a hot drink dispensary. Their nasal, rapid, and often interrupted conversation spans from the virtues of roast turkey and ice cream to the cremation experience of one denizen’s mother-in-law. They are engrossed with the latter topic today. But be at ease, absolutely everything they say is hilariously funny. Finally, he who looks to be the eldest of the group, and thus the one who is “next in line”—if you’ll pardon my insensitive expression—remarks that he is absolutely not going to be cremated. He insists he is going to be put in a box when he dies. When his companions ask why the whole room becomes quiet, and he says, why it’s because he’s only going five miles from his home when he dies. Well, it was the quip of the day and with a chorus of delightful shrieks other pairings of coffee drinkers around the shop join the circle table in the delicious enjoyment of a memorable remark on life—or death—by one of those that seems in the moment to offer the most eloquent observation within the recent time frame of an intellectual drought. Nevertheless, it is one of those things that is incommunicable to others—you had to be there. One of those things that is only funny to those who have sat and sipped in this temple of Java—this Mukilteo Coffee Company, with its ridiculous eggplant-colored walls covered with reproduction gas station signs and as visited by these sages in woolen sweaters. Making merry for tomorrow they die.