Club Starbucks

I never thought I would say this but I was ecstatic to learn that the Starbucks in my neighborhood was open from 5 AM until midnight every day. Being a coffee shop snob, the thought of going to Starbucks for anything besides the rare java chip frappucino was unthinkable to me. Let me explain why. For six years, I lived in a quaint New England college town with more coffee shops than gas stations. Chain stores were banned from our town, and in their place were a whole gaggle of independent book stores, hippie coffee shops, an anarchist bike repair store, and even a cooperatively owned print shop.

I’m a writer, and coffee shops are essential for my creative soul. In order for me to get productive, be it with school assignments or my own writing projects, everything needs to be perfect. The perfect pen, the perfect paper, the perfect place. The first two are easy enough, but finding a perfect place is not so evident. Perfect for me is a place where I can be anonymous and yet be surrounded by people – hopefully people who are also working towards the pursuit of creative genius. Also, what is perfect one day might not be perfect the next; sometimes I want to work in the midst of a busy cafe, and other times I’d like to write in a dimly lit dungeon. It all depends on what I’m writing and how I’m feeling at the time.

In the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, I had my pick of the lot. There was a coffee shop to fit my many moods and desires. Let’s say it was a Sunday and I had a long day of reading ahead of me. I would probably head over to the Book Mill, a gorgeous renovated paper mill perched precariously over the Mill River a few towns away from my college. The winding drive would be worth it on its own, as we passed foggy fishponds and sleepy farmhouses overgrown with forest.

The coffee shop was attached to a bookstore, each whimsical in their own way. The only way to get oriented around the maze of strange corridors, walls of dusty books and tiny staircases was with the various bay windows that looked down to the fast-moving water below. Often, that was all I ended up doing at the Book Mill: staring hopelessly out the window at the surrounding beauty, musing about the direction of my life (or lack thereof) over a cup of hot chocolate. Sometimes, this is all you really need to be doing on a Sunday afternoon, with the sun glowing on snow-dusted trees and a river rushing under your feet.

But let’s say I was in a bit of a rush; it’s the middle of the week and I need to get downright productive. Rao’s would be my place. Industrious, but not overly so, Rao’s was always buzzing with energy, whether from the baristas shouting orders behind the counter, or from the chess game going on in the corner. There you could find students discussing linguistics or a professor editing their latest book. There was an academic air about the place, without the pomp and circumstance. The seats were mismatched but comfortable, the bathroom walls were covered in layers of colorful philosophical manifestos, and the muffins were vegan but delicious. They always played the right music, too - relevant but never mainstream. It was all a girl could ask for in a coffee shop.

If Rao’s was full or the ambience was just too crazy for my mood, I knew to head over to Amherst Coffee. The more serious of the lot, AmCof, as we affectionately called it, had a hoity-toity tea menu and an elegant happy hour. But they also had long wooden tables where I could spread out and the most charming folk band playing on Sunday morning, so Rao’s quickly became part of my weekend routine.  There is nothing more beautiful than watching the snow fall outside the window from a cozy spot with a cup of fancy loose tea to the sweet sounds of Tom Waits being covered by an angel voice.

But back to Miami, where my coffee shop selection is less than ideal. Books & Books, being the most obvious choice as a writer hang-out, has nary a workspace in sight. Unless you are there to have a meal, it’s nearly impossible to find a table to spread out and get to work. Public libraries have shrunk their hours considerably over the last few years, making it an unreliable place for me and my schedule. So, all this to say, I was amazed to learn that the Starbucks a few blocks from my house was open almost around the clock. I could already envision early mornings, hunched over my notebook, steaming coffee at hand. A late night craving for some peaceful writing time? I knew where to go. Or so I though. I started going sporadically, whenever I had a free hour to write here and there. Then one evening, I decided to get some writing done after dinner. It was already around 8 o’clock, but that meant I still had FOUR solid hours before Starbucks closed. It was perfect.

I stationed myself at one of the tables outside with my notebook-sized Acer laptop. I had a big jar of tea and a beanie on my head to ward off the wind coming from the ocean nearby. The table was a bit shaky, but I barely noticed in my enthusiasm to get finally get some words onto the page. As I got to work on a piece I had been writing in my head for weeks, I tried to ignore the bustling commotion all around me. For starters, visitors kept coming up – they must have been tourists – to pose for a photograph in front of the coffee shop, usually just a few feet from where I sat with my computer. This baffled me. There was a pretty fountain nearby, but this was not the backdrop that people chose for their pictures. They wanted the Starbucks. I didn’t get it, but I shook my head and got back to work. This wasn’t going to derail me.

More distracting than the tourists were the conversations of the people sitting around me. I tried hard not to eavesdrop, but the conversations were just too juicy to ignore. A discussion between a man and a woman about the many merits and disadvantages of fake breasts. A group of metrosexual hipsters trying to one up each other with their knowledge about high art. A cocky Guido trying his best suave moves on a new chick. I sighed, and made a mental note to bring earplugs next time.

As the night grew later, the crowd got zanier. People were crisscrossing the plaza on their way from one bar to another, the guys shouting obnoxiously and the girls clutching one another drunkenly as they tried to make it up the stairs in their ridiculous high heels. It wasn’t even the weekend! Once the bar upstairs turned up their music in preparation for a night of dancing and debauchery, I took this as my cue to move. I hauled all of my belongings inside Starbucks, eager for some peace and quiet.

Unfortunately, the employees at Starbucks had other plans. Soon after I settled into my new spot, the music coming out of the speakers switched unceremoniously from soothing Bob Dylan to head-splitting electronic beats. I felt like I was smack in the middle of Ultra Music Fest! Now, I’m not one to diss club music, but there is a time and a place for it, and Starbucks Coffee is not one of them. One by one, my neighbors began closing up their laptops and gathering their paperwork, shooting dagger eyes at the employee in an apron who was breaking into dance moves while attempting to mop the floor. He did not seem to notice, and just kept right on dancing.

I tried with all of my might to hold tight and fixate on the words floating on the screen in front of me but my attempts proved futile. The boom boom boom noises were drumming themselves into my subconscious, suffocating any intelligible thought that tried to surface in my brain.  I finally gave up the fight. You can take the girl out of the club, but you can’t take the club out of Miami, and this was a truth that I had to learn to accept.

Florida Oranges

For some reason, I was always adamant about getting out of South Florida for college. “OK, so where do you want to go? FSU, UF, UCF?” my family asked. But I was looking a bit farther afield than Gainesville. I had my sights set on the wilds of western Massachusetts.

“Pero porque?” my Cuban family cried. “Florida has great colleges! Why do you need to leave?” They could not fathom how I could possibly leave this place, this city that they had inhabited with such gusto after leaving Cuba as political exiles decades before. Miami was their home, and they had no intention of ever leaving. Well, maybe to visit some relatives in Hialeah…

I, on the other hand, was enamored with the idea of New England and all that it stood for. The ivory tower of academia, afternoon rambles through forested hills, sipping apple cider and watching the leaves fall. I soaked it in, attending as many lectures as humanly possible and jumping into giant leaf piles. I was one of those silly kids running out of my dorm in my pajamas to catch the first taste of snow on my tongue, along with Texans and Californians. After heavy snowfalls, I gleefully stole a plastic tray from the dining hall, along with the rest of the student body, to use as a sliding device on the biggest hill in town.

Needless to say, I never minded coming home for the holidays. Christmas break always came with impeccable timing, just when winter was beginning to wear down my soul, when the snow had begun to look like cold mud, when I could count the number of daylight hours on one hand. As soon as my exams were through, I had the good fortune of spending six blissful weeks soaking up the sunshine and swimming in the sea, chastising my family whenever they complained that 60 degrees was “cold.”

Of course, it was never hard to convince visitors to come down for a visit. One spring break, my friends and I boarded the last plane leaving Hartford airport before shutting down for a snow storm. Within two hours, we went from a barren frozen tundra to a sun-soaked paradise. When I introduced my friends to my family, my great aunt exclaimed – “No nos dijistes que tus amigas eran asiaticas!” You didn’t tell us your friends were Asians! I … didn’t know I had to?

During that visit, one of these Asian ladies struck up friendly conversation with my dad about Florida oranges.

“Florida oranges are mainly for the juice,” my foreign father explained.

My friend gave him a quizzical expression. “I know there are a lot of Jews in Florida, but why do they need all the oranges?” she asked.

Now it was my father’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “You need oranges to make juice,” he pressed, the confusion showing in his voice.

This went on for a little while, until the hilarity of the situation dawned on my friend and she backed away slowly. “Carmella,” she whispered to me, mortified. “Your dad thinks I’m crazy!”

Back in the Pioneer Valley, I started getting fanatical about the inadequacies of our national food system. Luckily, the region I was living in was a hotbed of local foods and organic farming. But every time I came home, I always got a healthy dose of reality.

At the Winn-Dixie down the street from my parent’s house, I was aghast to find South African oranges for sale. I asked the guy stacking potatoes to please fetch his manager.

“What can I help you with, senorita?” he asked.

“This orange is from South Africa!” I said to him, waving the offending orange in his face.

“ But what’s wrong with it, Miss?” he asked, genuinely perplexed, trying his best to understand my concern.

“We live in Florida!” I yelled at him, before stomping away without buying anything.

Another time, I passed a roadside stand with a man selling mamoncillos. I pulled over eagerly.

“Did you grow these in your garden?” I asked him in Spanish, unable to contain my excitement. Again, another look of confusion.

“No, I got them off a barge in the port of Miami,” he told me, unapologetically. “I’ve got no idea who grew them.”

I drove away, dejection welling up inside of me. What was wrong with these people?

Back in New England, people spoke my language. I could use the term “post-petroleum society” without having to explain it. Potlucks were extravagant affairs of over-the-top foodie dishes comprised of as much locally-grown produce as possible. I bartered with friends for anything and everything, trading baked goods for massages or Asian pear jam for fresh goat cheese. I knew the farmer who raised the beef I consumed, and I’d walked the pastures where they had spent their days before becoming my dinner.

But then something happened. It started as a strange whisper, a small inkling that maybe something was not right. Reggaeton blasting from a passing car made me feel a pang of nostalgia. Frequent calls home made me realize that I was actually missing my nagging, nosy relatives who always knew what was going on in everyone’s lives and, of course, had an opinion about everything.

As it turns out, I was tired of sautéing wild-harvested fiddleheads in local garlic scapes and making jerky out of roadkill. I missed the warmth of my hometown and the straightforward way of my people that could be called ignorance or maybe just blatant political incorrectness. I missed the looks of wild confusion from the store clerk when I’d refuse a plastic bag. My grandfather would tell me to “Take the bag, Carmella. It’s free!” Could it be that I was tired of being one in thousands of life-minded foodie freaks living in an increasingly tiny valley?

After a particularly painful early-season snow storm, I packed my car with all the vestiges of my New England life – jars of home-grown fruit and vegetable preserves, bags of dried plants harvested from the woods, a feather from a rooster I had killed to make soup – and headed south.

One of the first things I did when I settled into my new old home was plant a garden in my front lawn. With my New England seeds in hand, I applied what I had learned up north to this new land. Much to my dismay, my plants did not fare well that first season. The spinach bolted, the cucumbers withered, and the garlic wouldn’t bulb. It was the wrong season, the wrong varieties, the wrong timing, the wrong crops altogether.

Over time, I found locals who were willing to share their knowledge of growing food in South Florida with me. Little by little, I found the right varieties for zone 10b. I began to notice what time of year the jasmine plants flowered and when the loquat trees would drip with fruit. I knew where to stop for a banana snack on my morning walk, and which star fruit tree yielded the sweetest specimen.

Next thing you know, I’m trading fresh sourdough for hand-whipped body products and bundles of rosemary appear on my front porch, a gift from a gardener friend passing through the neighborhood. These days, my dehydrator is filled with mangos and papayas, and I feel blessed to live in this land of exotic oranges and crazy drivers.

Morning Bread

New piece published here to go along with my new micro-bakery business.

Enjoy, friends. May you eat fresh bread every day, read poetry before bed, and be merry always.