imagined-community

True Grounds in Ball Square, Somerville

Some of you may remember that on the last day of NaPoBlog I wrote that I had begun rethinking my blog. In my opinion, my blog had lost focus. I started blogging intending to explore a broad guiding question: how have I, have all of us, fashioned identities that are simultaneously local, rooted in limited, specific communities and cultures (culture with a capital C), and global, extended by our interdependence, even enmeshment, with other cultures and nations. Over time, I began to lose sight of this guiding question. Eventually, I completely derailed and was blogging almost primarily about my personal life. While writing about my personal life kept me blogging, it is not what I really want to do.

Then back in December, laid up in bed, unable to walk, in a slightly drugged state, it came to me that if my blog was going to refocus on my original question, I would need to do the following: get a topic, let go of my desire to comment on everything under the sun, and blog less but more deeply. But what single topic was both intrinsically local & global? What single topic was open and expansive enough to maintain my interest, perhaps for a very long time, and yet definite enough to provide an anchoring center? Perhaps it was the painkillers. Or the boredom of solitary confinement. But the answer FINALLY came to me. Coffee. Caffe. Kahveh. Qahwah. The bean leads everywhere; it’s been everywhere; it is everywhere. Coffee was going to be my topic.

Years ago I told Vinnie, an aspiring actor working as a bartender in a dingy restaurant in Philadelphia, when I sat down at his bar to have a cup of coffee before I began my luncheon wait shift, and he asked me, in his deep Italian voice, “Jennifer…what is it…what is it that gets you up in the morning?” (Translation: “I do this because my passion is to become an actor. What’s driving you?”) I stared at the mirror behind the bar for a few seconds and then blandly responded, “Coming here to have a cup of coffee?” Vinnie set the coffee pot down and shook his head, “That’s not good. That’s not good.” I laughed.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “…use your faults; at any rate use your knowledge of them, and don’t run your head against stone walls.”

If aimlessness and coffee are my two greatest faults, why not put them to use? Blogging tends to have an aimless quality about it. And a blog about coffee that meanders about the globe following the path of a beverage brimming with a xanthine alkaloid compound better known as caffeine? If I didn’t know better I would say my plan sounds practically purposeful.

So check back. The coffee grounds say my blog will be changing in the months ahead…

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Hurrah Hurrah. Oh Happy New Year. Finally, I can breathe again; my annual holiday trip to Florida is over. As always, after a few days with my controlling mom I returned to the Northeast angry and frustrated, disappointed with myself, exhausted, depressed, and all too acutely aware of how my least favorite ways of interacting with people were born in my relationship with my mother. On the positive side, I often responded to my mother as I would to any other person (centered, kind and detached) rather than in one of my mom communication styles: the know it all or the withdrawn teen.

Florida itself was a trip. Mom lives in one of those planned retirement communities where everyone drives around in a golf cart. I think the minimum age to live in the golf cart community is 55. Whenever two people under the age of 55 pass each other on the street it is customary for both persons to gently nod their head and make some companionable “You too, huh” eye contact. The “you too,” signifying something like, “You’ve got relatives living here? Yeah, me too.” I personally think there is something fundamentally bizarre, like inbreeding, about any place that is defined by a single age group, be it high school or a retirement community (at least the university has graduate and non-traditional students). But I suppose these holding tanks, I mean communities, are easy and fun. Though every time a golf cart sped by I swear I heard the voice of Rod Sterling intone, “your moving into a land of both shadow and substance…you’ve just crossed over into the twilight zone.”

Mom

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