#I like Daisy a lot in theory it just doesn’t fully feel like an adult name to me

[homosociallyyours]

a friend just posted a pic on fb of the coffee shop we used to hang out at, taken way back in the day. it’s just a shot of the place taken from inside, looking out the big glass windows and onto the street of downtown chattanooga. but one friend pointed out that she could see another friend’s van parked across the street, and one of the baristas came on and said he’d taken the photo and then proceeded to post a bunch more. 

anyway i’m feeling nostalgic so i’m posting about it. memories behind the cut. 

i started going there when i was maybe 15 years old. i don’t remember why, but it’s likely that the artsy nerd club i was a part of (we stayed after school to watch amadeus and monty python and we’d sometimes go to the local art museum) went there after a meeting one day. or maybe someone told me about it. anyway, it was my favorite place to go. i would drink pots of tea, always trying new things. 

on my 16th birthday my parents got me a teapot from there and a gift certificate to buy tea with. i had that teapot til it broke a year ago. 20+ years! it moved with me to and from college, to nyc, california, texas, and back to california. damn. 

anyway after i’d been going for a while i started talking with the owner. his name was ian, and he was pretty young. he loved tea and coffee and he had a roaster where they’d make their own coffee. it was loud and lovely, and for a long time it lived up front, right by a little elevated area with couches. when it was running you couldn’t hear anything and had no choice but to either shout or be quiet. 

ian encouraged my love of tea, and offered to keep track of everything i’d tried in a little notebook that was kept behind the counter. i got to make notes on every pot i drank, and i remember writing “terrible! grass!” after my first pot of green tea (it was oversteeped--my fault--and probably made with water that was too hot--their fault). i had my first pu-er there, and fell in love with its damp leaf flavor and that turned earth scent that it has. i drank multiple pots of jasmine pearls and wrote a caffeine fueled poem about it with a friend. i loved that little coffee shop. 

i don’t remember when i went from hanging out inside to hanging out outside, but i feel like i was 18 or so. the older people (they were probably barely 21-25, fucking babies) sat out there smoking and drinking coffee. i developed a crush one summer on a guy who made me think of arthur dent for some reason (don’t ask because i don’t know) and we went on one awkward date and didn’t kiss, and now i wonder what’s happened to him and if he, too, wasn’t straight. who knows? someone, i’m sure, but i can’t remember his last name anymore so is it even relevant? 

i’d never felt cool til i went off to college. it was like leveling up without trying, like when you’re playing a game and do one action and suddenly all your stats are refilled and you’re like...this is unexpected? but i’ll take it? i think that’s why i decided i could really sit with the outside tables. that and my bff, who was dating someone who was friends with a lot of those people, would show up sometimes and sit out there. 

(if you’ve actually been reading along so far, here’s where i’m gonna introduce you to a bunch of people i’ve never talked about before and will likely never mention again. just so you have fair warning.) 

the cast of characters shifted a lot, but there were always the constants. scott, the barista, who was much older than most of the people hanging out but looked young and seemed young. i look back with adult eyes and question the relationship we had, but at the time i just thought it was cool that someone so much older thought i was worth hanging out with. but he was 30 when i was 19, and man that’s a lotta years. he had a summer where he hit on my friend and i constantly, after his wife left him and he was kinda floundering a bit. but it never went past flirting and it never bothered me, though like i said it kinda does now. we were still hanging out when i was 21 and we’d go get beers after the coffee shop closed at ten or midnight. he’d turn up obnoxious music really loud and i’d sometimes help close. 

there was gabe and george, brother and sister in a family of people with names starting with the letter g. george was tiny and cute and either very drunk or very hyper from coffee at all times. gabe was a nerd who was usually quiet but loved to play scrabble, and we’d take the board inside sometimes and battle one another. he was much better than me, i won’t lie. liz and ever were both writers who would play with us sometimes. ever had changed her name at some point (to ever; any name she had before is irrelevant) and when we met she explained the meaning of her new name, which i won’t give because damn it’s very google-able. 

she was a so fascinating to me, always talking about some feminist theory or philosopher, and i always felt so smart when we’d hang out. like a Serious Thoughtful Adult and not a kid. and liz was less serious but no less smart. she played scrabble a lot more and for a while we got pretty close. she took me out after coffee sometimes to a shitty bar with pool tables and tried to teach me how to play pool. she had her own cue and even though she was like 5′2″ she could break like nobody’s business. i never figured out how to do that part. 

alex would come with us sometimes. he was tall and handsome and rode a motorcycle, and was the first openly bi guy i ever met. one time he invited me over to his house and we laid around listening to the smiths and talking. he burned me a copy of their greatest hits that i still have, all scratched up so it probably doesn’t play anymore. he crashed his bike more than once driving drunk. dumb fuckin kid. now he repairs coffee machines and sails, i think. life is funny. 

a few other people ran in groups. meg and waide and the aforementioned jason and ardyce. some people called meg “big megan” and another megan (her family was really wealthy, rich southern politicians who knew the clintons and have a mention in sweet home alabama--the song, not the movie) was “little megan” because she was still in high school. i joked that i was medium megan, but the whole thing was awkward because big megan was fat and i was small fat and little megan was skinny. i’m gonna blame it on thoughtless dudes, but who the fuck knows? we all pretended not to mind it anyway. 

waide ended up being a connection with other people who i met later. my hometown is weird in that it’s actually a pretty big part of the southern punk scene, so a lot of punks i meet have spent time there, and anyone over a certain age probably spent time at the bar waide worked at (the stone lion, and then maybe also the pickle barrel) so he’s one of those people who i’ll end up mentioning even though we haven’t spoken in years. 

at some point a kid named ory showed up. i think he was 16 when he started coming around, and i used to call him puppy because he was excitable and silly, full of energy one minute and then mopey crashing the next. like a lot of people there he drank a lot and would be fucked up sometimes and make dumb choices. i always wanted to protect him. when i was 22 (and he was 19, i think) we ended up sitting together at the second lotr movie and having some kind of weird chemistry. that summer i drove him home one night and we had a super heavy make out with lots of clothed grinding. honestly the furthest i’ve ever gone with a cis straight(ish, he hooked up with a couple dudes but idk if he’d say he’s bi) dude and it was awkward in that we never talked about it? and then he came to visit me a couple years later in new york because he was in the navy, and he got super drunk and passed out on my couch and was a mess because he literally never stopped being a puppy. 

he’s fucked up now, fully cancelled bc he said shit about girls rock camp (really dude?) and also probably cheated on his wife on their honeymoon? idk, it was fb rumors and then he deleted. but i’d believe it, honestly. 

and then there were all these absolutely random downtown characters: dirty mark (a crusty punk who was drunk or high most of the time) and shirtless dave (yeah he really didn’t wear a shirt that much) usually came as a pair. sometimes dave hung out with a guy my friends and i called blue hair. he once hit on my friend and she panicked and gave him my number instead of hers because her brain didn’t make up a fake number fast enough. 

there was sandy the flower man, who just passed away a couple weeks ago. he’d get flowers from local florists and go around on his bike, stopping into the coffee shop or to bars with roses and carnations and daisies. people gave him money usually, but sometimes he’d just hand you a flower because he wanted to. i saw a picture from a memorial and there was a portrait of him that was sat on top of his bicycle, all of it surrounded with flowers on flowers. so pretty. it’s what he deserved. 

things changed around 2005 or so, i think. by that time, all the old baristas had left and the kids who came in were all weirdly religious and went to the christian college on the mountain. they made shitty coffee and sometimes played xtian rock and most of the old regulars couldn’t take it anymore. ian got sick around that time, too, and ended up selling the place. they stopped carrying much tea, if any. 

but they finally sold the space and moved in like 2015. i remember the first time i drove by and didn’t see the lights on inside. it felt like seeing a friend from grade school all grown up, maybe the kid you had a crush on but they have a family now and you don’t think they’d recognize you at all so you just have to walk away. gone. 

fuck this post is long as shit, i’m sorry for anyone on mobile. but damn it was good to get my memories out.