The town is not historic, grand, or elegant. It is becoming dumpy–year-by-year. Dumpy in an appealing way, what my family likes to call beach dumpy.
Regulars open the sidewalks at six o’clock each morning. They gather at the coffee shop to talk about the weather and to complain about the latest real estate developments that bring the mcmansions to block the ocean view from the highway. The town bakery opens at six thirty, but only the vacationers stop there—locals know that the largest cup of coffee can now be had at the new coffee shop, down on the boardwalk.
Routine is the rule of this fledgling beach town. Caught in the adolescence of growth, old and new share the sidewalk. Each summer one new restaurant or store comes in as a replacement for the one that went out of business. Only one, maybe two. Not so much change that the routine is disrupted. Except for the coffee shop. When it arrived three years ago, the town began to awaken a half hour earlier, and the conversation became a half hour longer.
I am not a native, but I am a regular. July and August are my months for beach coffee—one week in each month. I have come in June and in the fall, but my daughters are now well into school, and we can no longer skip whole weeks during the school year, just to beat the summer traffic.
Therefore, for two weeks, in the middle of summer, each year, I join the conversation. Not that it is worth joining for any particular reason other than joining. It is the same every day, routine. That is what I like about it—simple talk, something that I will do nowhere else for the rest of the year.
