Coffee and Windows

I’m 12 years old and riding in the back of my mom’s car and we pass a huge Dunkin Donuts sign on Telegraph road and the sign reads, “World’s Best Coffee.”  My friend Harley and I crack up.  How can there be good and bad coffee?  At that point in my life, pre-Starbucks, coffee was something that came in Taster’s Choice crystals and measured out into a mug and topped with boiling water and a pink packet of fake sugar that everyone said gave you cancer.

Fast forward 20 years and coffee was a teeth staining, bad breath creating, stomach churning energy source for many, but not me.  But I wanted to be a coffee drinker.  I wanted to sit there with my mug in the morning, steam rising, looking out of my office window.

Like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: I loved the smell of coffee in the morning, it smelled like victory.  But I never drank the stuff.  Until now.

Coffee in Europe, to me, tastes, looks, smells and feels different and I’m sure it’s in my head.  But I’ve become a serious espresso drinker, once in the morning and again at lunch.

A secondary point.  I am a believer in windows and sunlight and all that comes from it.  I believe in it even more now that we are in London and throughout the short days and long nights of winter people are downing Vitamin D pills like tic tacs.

Our first Washington office of Marketresearch.com was in a windowless building basement.  For the two years we were there we were unprofitable and struggled through the start up phase, cash crunches and funding troubles.  In year three we moved to a first floor, windowed office and the company turned.

There is a Nero Coffee Bar between the tube stop and my London office.  On my way in I stop for a single espresso served to me by a six foot tall Italian woman who spies me from the end of the line and barks, “Single Espresso, stay in.”

I drink it there.  I like my two sips of coffee at the bar surrounded by conversation.  I don’t know why, maybe because I want my espresso hot, maybe it’s the miniature ceramic cups with the tiny spoon that I like, or the way the brown sugar lays at the bottom like wet cement.

And so each morning I stop in, pay my pound fifty and sit by the front window over-looking Fenchurch Street.

And every day it changes.  There are businessmen hustling through the rain or cold or just because they are late to a meeting.  There are people in scarves and hats and tweed jackets and sometimes pretty women pass by in skirts and I watch the men catch an eye-full.  And I watch the thousands of stories in the faces of the people in the store:  The business meeting, the couple having a last conversation before work (they must be newlyweds), the college student struggling through a term paper, the unemployed middle aged man hoping that today will be the day.