The Man and the Coffee Shop, pt 2

So his days went. He would go to class in the morning, have his studious break at the coffee shop, then go back to class in the evening. He worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There was no break for him, but studying during his break in classes allowed him to visit the neighborhood bar or the bar at the restaurant where he worked, and drink either beer or wine, respectively. He enjoyed both, but the beer was too expensive at work, and the wine at the neighborhood bar was crap. He would go to the place that had what he felt like drinking. He would sit and drink, and maybe eat. If friends or acquaintances were around, he would talk to them and be boisterous and drink. Otherwise he would sit and watch sports, or sit and write. He was going to school to become a writer. More accurately, to earn a degree to become a professor to support himself while being a writer.

The man wrote a lot. He wrote when he had free time. He wrote while waiting for the professor to show up to class. He wrote when stressed, when overwhelmed with school-work or work-work. He wrote when bored. The man was often bored. He was bored when he was not reading or writing, mostly. Classes bored him, when they were not English or language or art. They bored him especially when the professor talked straight from the text. He often thought, while in those professors’ classes, This is not the kind of teacher I want to be. Then he would think of all the great teachers he had. The first was his kindergarten teacher in Virginia Beach. As a young child, he had loved her. That is the greatest compliment for a teacher, to be loved, he thought. His fourth-grade math teacher in Burke had helped him understand school. In sixth grade he had a teacher who really turned him on to reading; she had assigned Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game to the class. Ever since reading that book he had been hooked. He quickly proceeded from Card to Stephen King to Hemmingway. From Hemmingway he got interested in William Faulkner, and then William Shakespeare. This all happened before his junior year of high school. He respected the authors more than his own parents. They were children of the fifties and sixties and products of the Vietnam War. They wish they had been hippies, and if they could get rid of the youngest fifteen-year-old son, they would be living that life now, if individually.

The Man and the Coffee Shop, pt 1