A Slice of Cake, a Hippy and the Church Drummer

So my recent trip to Fort Collins was inspirational in many ways. As a writer I find the unexpected rhythms of small towns energizing. I was delighted to get to spend the day writing at Wolverine Farm Publick House Which is a coffee shop/writing nook/book store/publishing house/meeting place for everyone in Fort Collins with a beard and a sock cap.

The entire upstairs has long tables where people can write or think or contemplate their next tattoo. It was very cool, with the glaring exception of one middle-aged woman in decidedly uncool clothes, beardless, with no sock cap, who was aggressively typing things into an iPad like some kind of corporate refugee. (It was me. I was the corporate refugee.)

I took a break and walked to a place billed as a ‘cake café’, Starry Night. The picture on this post is of their spice cake. One word: incredible. I took that slab of cake outside to eat it with an iced tea (in January!). I sat out there with two gentlemen who seemed to be the Fort Collins equivalent of the Muppet Show hecklers, Statler and Waldorf. Their names were Mike and Chris. Mike is a Viet Nam veteran who has lived in Fort Collins for 41 years. Chris is a drummer in a church band who volunteered to drive Mike to all of his doctor appointments, which is how they became friends. Now, every day that the weather is nice (which is a lot of days) they sit outside of the Starry Night cake café and chat with passers by, many of whom have running gags going with Mike and Chris. They told one gentleman, driving a mobility scooter, to pull his head out of his a$#, and then all three of them laughed uproariously. One woman named Deb, who works at the Birkenstock store (because, of course), stopped to chat and told us about her disastrous trip to get her key fob battery replaced at her car dealer. Mike and Chris weren’t just sympathetic they were irate on her behalf. I say Deb told “us” because Mike and Chris started introducing me to people as they walked up to chat, and so everyone naturally included me in the conversation.

I sat there for over an hour, my cake long gone, just soaking it all in. This is what I’m trying to build in Blue Lake not just a setting, but a living, breathing community where people know each other’s stories, where a church drummer and a Vietnam vet can become best friends through doctor’s appointments, where strangers become “us” over a slice of spice cake.