An Open Letter to the Current Owner of My “Heart is Greater than Money Sign” Wallet

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coffee, credit cards, letter, money, morality, new york, NYC, open letter, Starbucks, stolen, wallet

Dear person who has my wallet: Due to the twelve business cards inside bearing my name and email address, my personalized Starbucks card on which you are free to have a drink (on me), and the pretty picture of me on my New York license (though I am not a New Yorker), all your excuses are morally inept. Should you require a reward for the return of my wallet, that can be arranged. The reward for keeping it has already been vanquished with a few phone calls.

Come on dude/dudette, it’s 2012 and I’m oh-so-quick like that. Buy yourself a venti soy something and give it back.

Regards,

Linda Anne Dennison

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7. Bleached Coral

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100 words, aging, Bonaire, character, city, coffee, coral reef, exercise, experience, fast, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, island, life, ocean, one hundred words, pace, past, profile, slow, train, tropics, urban, writing prompt, youth

Thought I saw you on the train today as those tired eyes caught sight of mine. Saw beneath the shadow brim, shifting greys hiding a wrinkling face. I’ve seen you differently before, skin aglow, dancing with youth and light. I knew you a traveler, a good doer. As in motion, as a curious seeker. A morning waker coffee drinker.

You step carefully in new cloth flats around puddled sidewalks, rain waterfalling down subway grates. Measured and slow, left risk at the front door. Searching for rewind. Lifeless and aged, a bleached coral changed by this undercurrent of cold winter waters.

Moments that Make Marathons

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coffee, conversation, distance, driving, future, life, love, marathon, marriage, moments, perspective, relationship, Starbucks, travel, waiting

Her coffee was too hot, she said. She usually tells them not to make it so hot. When they do, she can’t drink it right away and she hates that. I wondered, when she said hate, if she really hates it or if it’s just something she doesn’t like very much. I’m always wondering about things like that.

She stirred the whip cream, melted it into her coffee with a wooden stick from the coffee bar. Talked about how, today, differently than some of her yesterdays, she would shake nutmeg and cinnamon into her travel mug and see how her taste buds appreciated the gesture.

I hope it keeps me awake on my way to Flint, she said.

She invited me into her conversation, and I took a step I hadn’t planned on taking. The one on my map led me back to my table, to my isolation, brewing in mediocre circumstances, trying to grade papers. My map used terse words and fake smiles. But the step I took was off the map, it went beyond the hatred I feel for a commitment I must fulfill honorably, with excellence. It left papers ungraded. It spoke with patience for a relationship that must wait behind phone calls and weekend flights to spend forever. It worried not about me; it listened and found waiting unobtrusive.

Her husband, I learned, works across the state and she’s driving across to see him. They’ve been doing this for two years. And will do it still for one more.

I thought fleetingly, while she was sharing, of the eight-hundred miles that separate me and Brad, and how we struggle to appreciate this far-away time before being together, proximally, permanently. About how she was trying something fresh and new, something as simple as spices in her coffee, after two years of regular separation from her permanent lover. Her spices gave me perspective.

Good luck, honey, she said as she left. For what remained of our relationship between Michigan and New York, she meant. Even though she was the one driving to bridge the chasm in a marriage. Three-hundred miles, maybe. Between two that are supposed to be one.

Good luck to you two, she says, and climbs in the van on her way to Flint.

Relationships cannot be maintained by mail.

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chance, change, coffee, communication, effort, envelope, friendship, hockey, letters, life, love, mail, past, speculation, talking, travel, writing

I cannot win you over or back by affixing the self-adhesive stamp.
I will not turn time to hallways and hand-written notes, wide rule notebook paper
With bi-fold cards, sentiment on scrapbook paper, newspaper cutouts, gift cards

If we cannot have a cup of coffee,
Sit hours in uncomfortable chairs to tell stories,
I cannot know that you like the foam extra dry, that you don’t even like coffee
Peppermint tea with soy milk and honey

If I cannot be in the folding stadium seat beside you
On the ice, behind the boards or in the balcony, beer in a plastic cup
Swimming in the sleeves of my right wing who was on the Maple Leafs—
Now the Flyers

I cannot send myself to you
I cannot cross state lines
I am liquid and perishable
I am hazardous and otherwise fragile
I have crossed state lines, I have sent myself to you
I have bore this bridge
Unbroken this chasm, if only now, by mail.
And—

There is the possibility that this cannot be maintained by mail.

Halve the Caff

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addiction, caffeine, coffee, dependence, habits, history, life, morning, patterns

I bought half-caff today. I was shopping at Meijer without a list, haphazardly rolling my half-cart up and down the aisles, walking by items I needed and picking up items I didn’t. I shouldn’t shop without a list, my mother always told me. She’s always turning up right.

I rolled down the coffee aisles for the free smells, not for a pound of Folgers, six bucks on sale. But I’ve taken to plugging in my Braun four-cup brewer every morning like I turn on the lights. Light switch, coffeepot, computer when I unlock my classroom-home-away-from-home. Only then do I take my coat off and suck in the deep breath that starts the day.

I’m starting to need the coffee. Addiction is making caffeine part of my pattern and I’m not so happy with the realization of the weakness, the dependence. Addiction runs in my family. We take to ignoring it’s negative effects, going on as if we’re unsplintered and whole, unbroken by the vices of the tendencies we entertain. I noticed how captive we were sometime in high school. And it helps to be aware. But it doesn’t make me immune.

My eyes are starting to burn at the corners. I rub them until they’re red. The edges itch and I pull at the corners. They fall like I’m tired, but my body is awake. It’s calling for coffee, this broken body, forcing me into patterns I try to avoid.

So I bought half-caff to break the cycle. To slow the drip of caffeine daily into this body I drag around with me sun-up until sun-down. The patterns, for now, will remain. The caffeine, now, will be reduced away. With trickery, I’ll deprive my body of what it desires, doesn’t need, and I don’t want—but can’t stop—giving it.

Ring on the Coffee Cup

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coffee, conversation, eveing, friendship, life, living, love, Michigan, morning, nomadic, regret, travel, traveler, visit

Your coffee’s still on the nightstand. It’s been days since you’ve gone. Since you slept the night twice and we did up the days, philosophizing life over hot dogs and cards games. We don’t live high society. Too often, we shirk responsibility. We travel and talk of travel, one no more than the neighbor.

The coffee cup’s half full; you never bottom up. It marbles when I nudge the spoon, your creamer settling heavy on the ceramic floor. The ring inside the cup evolves with each evening. It’s grown and adapted, changed; I’ll need to soak it away for days. As if soapy-watered days can erase.

The nightstand’s not even mine. Nor the bed, the blankets, the coffee cup. I stay for a while to turn my wheels and find solid ground, quick kicking up dust. But I haven’t planted. I move, you move. We travel and talk of travel, nomadic. We leave behind rings on the coffee cup and bits of us hanging in the air.

Acquiring the Coffeepot Fear

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coffee, cubicle, disease, family, fear, office, paranoia, parents

Long ago, I diagnosed my parents with this short-term paranoia condition that began with and finds its fuel in what I call the Coffeepot Fear. It’s not the first issue that they’ve acquired in their old(er) age. They’ve got more Walgreens reading glasses lying around the house than a squirrel has acorns as the foot of a Maple come snowfall. Crossword puzzles sit unfinished, bills stack up without pay, receipts are never found, and newspapers stay in those tubular plastic bags when the litany of dollar-fifty reading glasses sit under couch cushions, in car cup holders, and in those tubular plastic bags with unread newspapers.  The status of the glasses is usually lost and the eyes of my dear parents, usually blind.  Sure, everybody’s got their issues.  Ya can’t see, can’t hear, can’t remember a thing, can’t reach the gas pedal on you minivan.  But the Coffeepot Fear has always intrigued me.   

It goes a little something like this: everything’s going as it should be until you realize that you should have left five minutes ago for wherever you’re going.  Then the race begins.  A whirling mess of untied shoes and unbuttoned shirttails hurries through a final inspection of the house, turning off appliances, flipping light switches this way and that, grabbing the cup of coffee from the microwave, letting the dog out (or back in), and finally landing in the car that’s backing out of the driveway to the rumbling and creaking of a closing garage door. 

Twenty minutes or so down the road, my parents have grown accustomed to the white-knuckling fear that comes flying out of nowhere.  Did I turn off the coffeepot?  I can understand how it may have slipped by, what with all the whirling and tumbling that preceded leaving.  But this one is a lingering fear that retraces every footstep trying to convince with certainty that the chances of returning to a pile of ash on account of a cup of coffee are unlikely. 

Well, I always thought the Coffeepot Fear was crazy.  Seemed like such an insane and useless fear.  I’d advocate a bit of relaxation because I figure chances are, the thing that needed to get done – whether it was coffee or taxes or brushing your teeth – probably got done one way or another.  But today, on only my fourth day at the office, I might be switch-hitting on my view of the Coffeepot Fear because I felt it and it was horrible.

I never thought I was cut out for an office job, but my current internship takes me there – right into my very own cubicle in the missions department of The Navigators.  I’ll shoot straight with ya, I don’t have the first clue as to how to manage an office or my time in it, so I started out by using post-it notes.  I soon find out that this is probably the worst idea possible for the sake of my sanity.  The post-it notes are trying to haunt me.  They’re giving me Coffeepot Fear.  Did I remember to tell Chase about the PDF converter?  Did I email that password to accounting?  Where did I put that list for Wal-Mart?  I’m ashamed to say that all this was tumbling and whirling in my head at ten o’clock at night, when I should have been thinking 10 parts sleeping and zero parts cubicle.

Turns out, I can’t blame everything on old age.  Maybe my parents are still sane.  Or maybe I’m just joining them on the other side of crazy.

Adventure-less Oma-braska

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adventure, coffee, conference, hotel, Letter to a Christian Nation, Nebraska, Sam Harris, vacation, weekend

With best regards to my good friend Josi, Nebraska is a complete bore from the 4th floor window of the Crowne Plaza. From this hill, the view isn’t as barren and farm-filled as I would’ve expected, in the Husker’s defense. There’s a Bag ‘n’ Save with a blue roof that I can see, but as it turns out, I can’t walk there unless I ford the river. It was too cold yesterday, and probably still too wet today.

It’s true, I’ve done things this weekend that I’ve never done before, so I’ll mark that down as moderately risky when I get home to my Adventure chart.  I used the individual coffee maker located (oddly) in the hotel bathroom.  Used it twice, no, three successful times!  Twice: to make hot water that cooked my travel Ramen meal.  Once: to make coffee, which was mostly sugar in the raw and powdered non-dairy creamer.  Yummy times three and, yes, adventurous.

You know, of course, that since I’ve stopped playing soccer, I abstain from most forms of physical activity.  Maybe it’s some sort of protest against the lack of futbol in my life.  But that would mean I’m protesting myself, which doesn’t make any sense at all.  So, no.  The alarming truth is: I rode the stationary bike here at the hotel for nineteen minutes, accompanied by my dear friend, Sam Harris.  Too bored (Sam and I ceased to have profitable convo at this point) to finish the twentieth minute, Mr. Harris stayed on the deck and I then jumped into the pool.  Treading water is more difficult than I remember, but all the working out was good.  Maybe I’ll do it again sometime.  Just maybe, don’t get excited.

I’ve kept up with my internet time-wasters: sites like gmail, goodsearch, and youtube, in the absence of my social life.  I’ll surely find out when I get home, that this aimless network wandering probably cost me another seventy dollars on the most expensive weekend of my life.  Tonight when I go see a movie and eat dinner at a steakhouse, recommended to me by the travel information man at the airport, I’ll front a comfortable cover of solo-living and tip twenty percent.  Then I’ll spend the night sleeping on my suitcase in the airport terminal, like a showered but still tired homeless woman. 

Nebraska brings out the duality in me.  Cheers!

Starbucks Partial Fast

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coffee, fasting, Starbucks

One of a litany of frequented Starbucks,

Today is November 17th, in the early minutes of the 18th by now.  It’s a Monday-turned-Tuesday.  No different of a day than any other Monday where each hour ticks by on the stovetop clock in wastefulness or laziness, always on the brink of something and never resting.  I mulled around in my house after I couldn’t get the lawn mower started this morning to cut the frosted grass.  I remembered how weak I felt when I first started mowing and my dad had to pull the cord because the cord pulled all 90 pounds of me. 

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I finally made it out of the house by 2:30 and had dinner with a friend who prays like Scripture sounds.  I learned more in 3 hours than some people will learn all year.  But something in the mix was off, not right for me.  It was a tall cup of coffee.

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I dropped off toys at the missionary thrift store and ordered tall-soy-no-whip-peppermint-white-mocha with a smile at the drive through like it was routine.  I’d never been to this Starbucks before, and the drive-thru’s brand new.  It wasn’t until Joel [his nametag read] handed me a Christmas-y cup and a receipt for a free drink that I realized how I’d vowed not to be here.  Not from November 1st until 30 days later.

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I hadn’t spent a dime this month on Starbucks as a financial remodeling of sorts and a committment to the Lord.  Not a dime until I handed Mister Joel a twenty and he returned fifteen.

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No one knew I was fasting, or would see my if I drank.  But I didn’t have the heart to throw it out and the five dollars we already corporate property. 

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I just forgot.  Other things were on my mind, I guess.  Funny how that happens – the forgetting – with things unseen.  Congrats, Satan, now I have to start all over again.  I’ll fast from tomorrow…this time, just try me.