#3: on being a regular in a place

take a wild guess where I am right now...

The other morning I came into the coffee shop I frequent and by the time I had walked up to the counter, the barista was already pouring my drip coffee for me. “Morning, chloe!” he said as he pulled out the almond milk, my creamer of choice, and then – “I should have double checked, but I assume you want the usual?”

I did want the usual, and he asked if I was staying warm in the cold weather (no) and how my finals were progressing (it was the last day! Hence me writing this instead of working on them). 

This, arguably, has become one of the best parts of my last few months: becoming a regular at this coffee shop. I’ve only been a regular at a few places throughout my life, mostly in college (mostly at coffee shops) and, in my opinion, being a coffee shop regular is genuinely one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. I feel like our greatest authors and artists and thinkers were regulars at some cafe or another, and they were probably onto something. Being a regular gives you a place to nest your brain, to comfortably think while existing in the public world, to return to yourself while marinating in the thoughts of others… The best three days of my entire Europe travels this summer were when we went to the same coffee shop every day and sat there, reading for hours. It’s that feeling of being nestled deep into a place that allows you to nestle deep into yourself. like a little coffee shop nesting doll.

I don’t know what the threshold is between being a familiar customer and a regular. or what the requirements are. Is there a certain number of times you must frequent the place? or must you order the same thing every time? or come at the same time? or every day wear the same thinned out brown Nike sweatpants you bought in Paris and can’t seem to take off because they have become your comfort pants and you can’t write effectively without them? Lol, just hypothetically, I mean. — Regardless, at some point, through some means, I seem to have become a regular.

Besides the fact that I get so much more done here than I would in the cold morning darkness of my room, I’ve found that I gather a lot here – a lot of world, a lot of thoughts. It’s partially the result of the caffeine, to be totally honest, but there’s also the people-watching, the patterns, the fact that I sit in nearly the same spot every day reading and drawing and observing. I have started to notice things, like the way the seats fill in as the morning draws on, or the other regulars – there are a few of us – and the way almost all of us order the same thing (drip coffee, the cheapest menu item) (it would be very easy for an evil mastermind to control a whole percentage of the population by injecting mind control serum into their drip coffee. like that Divergent scene except the victims are coffee shop regulars.) I often see the same people every day. There’s a guy, for instance, always in a black sweatshirt, and he sits on the upper seating area like I do and orders a drip like I do. He is always sketching; he brings a big sketchbook and perches there, the entire coffee shop spread out in front of him, and he looks around and draws. He can draw for hours – his sketching stamina is next level. I would like to be him when I’m older. Then there’s another man that always comes and reads. He always sits in the same spot, in the opposite corner as me, his back to the staff room. Like the sketching man, he can sit there for hours. The regulars here all seem to have incredible thinking stamina – or a long attention span. I wonder if there’s some connection.

There’s always a post man that comes, and he sits in the seat by the door early in the morning – around six thirty – and eats a pastry and a coffee. He only stays for fifteen minutes. There is always at least one man in a business suit. The outfit stays the same but the man inside changes. There is a man that sits in the corner near the shop’s only outlet and works on his computer. A PC. He is the only person that beats me here every morning; he must come right at six when they open. He always waits to order a coffee til 6:30, and he usually gets a cookie to go with it. I’ve made a friend too — one of the regulars and I struck up a conversation the other day and ended up talking for a long, long time. We always catch up now when we see each other there. It’s wonderful, I’ve learned a lot from him, and it is always something to look forward to.

Then there are the non-regulars. While they change every day, the patterns are the same. There is a large range of casualness – full-on business all the way to just-rolled-out-of-bed (me right now. read: brown sweatpants). Usually there are only one or two nonwhite people here, which while it does reflect this town as a whole, is always still somewhat shocking when I realize it. The men here, especially, are overwhelmingly middle-aged and white, and overwhelmingly clad in baseball cap, glasses and a sweatshirt (bearing the logo of some local brewing company). They are overwhelmingly involved in a conversation with another man (or two or three) who looks more or less the same. “My wife” populates the majority of their sentences. And then there are the students. We always have laptops open, and we sit here for four or more hours and do… what? Click around between tabs on our computer for half a day? What is it we do when we “study”? I don’t know honestly, but we’re all here doing the same thing. 

From my little perch on the upper deck – this is where I always sit –  the coffee shop space spreads below me, and so I can watch the room unfold without being too awkward. I love how it fills with conversation as the morning draws on. Conversation – or, rather, the conglomeration of multiple conversations – is a very specific sound, multi-layered, a low-sounding, dull hum punctuated by musical notes. It seems to have the texture of jam; you can imagine spreading it with a butter knife. It curls over surfaces but holds its form. Sometimes it rises up unexpectedly; often, as one voice gets louder, the rest do too. The laughter of one table merges with the seriousness of the one next to it. Young people talk quickly, excitedly; the two old men next to them have patience, slowness, carefulness with their voices.

There is this website where you can adjust coffee shop sounds to create the ambiance of a cafe. You can get cups clinking, background jazz music, conversations, coffee brewing, rain outside, etc etc. there are little bars to adjust the volume of everything. I think of the sounds in this real-life coffee shop, now, in layers, in levels, all cascading on top of one another and intermingling and breathing with one another. And I imagine I can reach out and adjust the knobs. Turn the jazz up a bit, the clinking of plates up. The crying baby down.

Anyways, the other night my friend hosted an end-of-finals wine night. (it was incredible. She set up a whole two tabletops full of nuts and fruit and chips and popcorn and homemade hummus and cookies.) Someone asked what the biggest thing everyone had learned that term was. I sometimes have a knee-jerk aversion to giving overly sentimental answers to something like this, so at first I said bubblegum (which I did try for the first time this term, to be fair). But then I amended it: the biggest thing I learned this term was to find a place to be a regular. And it’s the biggest piece of advice I’d give to anyone too. You find a place to be a regular, you’re automatically equipped with a (non-evil, hopefully) army of caffeine-loving friends, a space to nest your brain deep into, and a new little home-away-from-home paradise of thought. Brown sweatpants are nice too.