Cheers to Coffee and Pond Scum.
Yesterday I met good friend Mary Gardner at Starbucks on Aloma Avenue.
The door flew open and Mary came in carrying a small cooler like those that rush organs to hospitals. Hers was a tiny Playmate – so it couldn’t have been used for anything but a bitty bird heart or something. I knew better. Mary brought some blue green algae for me.
That’s all I’ve been hearing about from her. She looked great. I became curious about the contents of the bitty Playmate and if blue green algae could make me look great.
We ordered coffee. We went outside.
People were smoking outside with their coffee. We went back inside and surprise, surprise — there at a table sat fellow WPHS classmate Sandy Gantt Hayes.
We sipped coffee together, laughed lots until the cooler opened.
Mary poured us each a shot of blue green algae. It was like Gunsmoke, with Starbucks as the saloon and Mary as Miss Kitty.
Sandy drank first. I hesitated because of age-related gag reflex.
“It tastes like grass.”
That’s all it took to have visions of my puke of grass all over the table.
Sandy was brave and didn’t vomit – so I tipped up the algae. WOW.
With our brains on fire…
Conversation turned…
* To our kids and the challenges of raising children today.
* To our parents and the challenges of raising parents today.
* To us and the challenges of raised expectations that keep us trying to function at a reasonably high level today.
* How the most memorable moment of sophomore year was Andre Owens singing Reunited.
Sandy said her daughter is going to UF next year on a full track scholarship. A fact which impresses the heck out of me. (And all done without any green algae.)
She mentioned her track star daughter wondered why her parents would move back to Winter Park after living in Gainesville for so many years. Mary and her family moved back after living in New York City and about every place in between.
Fueled by coffee and algae we concluded that Winter Park, Florida next to Madison, Georgia is probably one of the most beautiful, greatest places to live. Sandy and Mary echoed that it had real community.
That is what we are all searching for – a place to belong.
Our children can’t imagine it, but twenty-five plus years from now, they will find themselves around a table at a Starbucks equivalent, drinking coffee and shots of blue green algae and wondering how they, their children and us (the aging parents) all fit together.
And where in the world did the last twenty-five years go?
It was great fun yesterday morning. And I felt great the rest of the day. Here’s to placing an order for algae.
Pills.
