Happy New Year !

Well, it’s one day away from a brand new year! It has been a wonderful year for The Shop Downtown and I want to thank each and every one of my customers, who I now call friends, for making it exciting, successful, wonderful and fun.

My wish for your new year is growth and prosperity. May each of you take all the things good and perhaps lessons learned, multiply and apply them to 2012. May you also be able to look at mistakes, regrets and misfortunes, with an honest evaluation and not repeat any mishaps made in 2011.

I look forward to seeing you all next week. I enjoyed my much needed brake, but miss everyone terribly.

Now, let’s all put a shout out to Michelle, who was amazing filling in for me last week. I am so thankful for her and appreciate the hard work. Michelle, may 2012 bring you extreme happiness and blessings!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

The Gentle Giant and The sweetest thing!

       He could be the poster child for the phrase, gentle giant. He stands about 6 feet 4 inches high and weighs well over 300 pounds. He is 74 years old exactly. I know his exact age because I simply asked his age one day and he simply told me, “I’m 74 years old.”

       This is my favorite customer in Schulenburg, Texas. He comes into the shop almost every day. He gets a small cup of black coffee with no lid and a slice of homemade banana bread, or anything that may be offered to him if there is not any banana bread that day. However, banana bread is his absolute favorite and it is always baked with him in mind. He sincerely wants to eat the banana bread each day, but the other things he accepts when the bread is void, may be out of pure politeness. He is one of the nicest and kindness men I have ever met.   His presence and company are always welcome in the Shop Downtown.

       The first time he came in was around Christmas time last year. The shop had just opened and business was all very new. He ordered a small black coffee, which was $1.50 total. I gave him his total with a smile, expecting to perhaps make change for $2.00 or have him say keep the change, which was one thing I had already grown accustomed to in my little shop, tips. Yet, this was not at all what transpired.

       The gentle giant  handed me a twenty dollar bill and quickly, in his extremely large deep voice, said, “Keep the change.”  I was shocked. I quickly pushed the bill back towards him, knowing I could not accept such a generosity. He was persistent, determined and intent on blessing me and I knew this. So, I retracted, smiled, thanking him sincerely as he smiled warmly back and said, “Merry Christmas”.

       This stranger was my Santa Claus that chilly December morning. His generosity and love warmed my heart along with the atmosphere in The Shop Downtown.

       This was just the beginning of his kindness and blessings tossed around each and every time he enters the door and sits upon my stool at the counter. He is truly an amazing man and everyone that meets him has said on one occasion or another, “He is such a great guy.”

       Yes, he is such a great guy and has become day after day an important asset to the Shop each morning somewhere between 10:00 or 10:30, when his presence graces the door of The Shop Downtown.

       His favorite thing to do is to offer to buy whatever may be being eaten or drank by whoever may be sitting across from him that morning. It could be just one customer from down the street drinking their usual small black coffee or an entire table of women eating, drinking, talking and enjoying their visit. It does not matter when, where or who, he just likes too bless people.

       My other favorite, who I will refer to as, The Sweetest Thing,  is one of my regular customers that would easily fall into the category of the Gentle Giant's favorite people to bless.

                         The Sweetest Thing

       The Sweetest Thing,  would stand about 5 feet tall if she stood straight, but she hunches over severely and this makes her about 4”10 on a good day. I don’t know her age and have never been comfortable enough to ask, not to mention she is extremely hard of hearing, so I always try to keep my questions to the bare minimum, for example; “ Would you like your usual roll and coffee?”

       She always answers, “hmmmh”, which means yes, and I serve her a cinnamon roll and a small black coffee with half coffee and half water in the cup.

       The Sweetest Thing walks to the coffee shop when she comes, which is usually a couple of times a week. She walks everywhere she travels. I don’t think it is because she cannot drive as much as it is that she does not have a vehicle to drive.

       The Sweetest Thing was born and raised in Schulenburg. I asked her once how high school was when she went here and she told me that she never went to high school. She was a poor country girl and had to drop out of school in the fourth grade to help her family work the farm.

       This was common for small town life when She was growing up. People had to do what they had to do to survive, including using their young children for labor.

       She is still hard working even in her golden years. I hate to guess for fear that I might be wrong, but I assume, safely or not, that she is in her late 70’s or early 80’s. She cleans for a living. I guess it is homes that she cleans, or perhaps offices, but I’m not really sure. I do know, you might see her walking around town on any given day, on her usual route, which is to her job, wherever she may be cleaning that day, the local bar or the shop downtown if it is early enough for coffee and too early for beer.

       She rarely smiles and you would most likely see her small hunched over frame with a serious scowl on her face than any other expression. Except for when The Gentle Giant is in The Shop and offers to buy her cinnamon roll and coffee. This always makes her light up and smile. It’s a delight to see someone illuminated, which has spent most of her days shadowed, over the wonderful kindness of a gentle giant. 

The Chronicles of The Shop Downtown

       It doesn’t look like much from the outside, the building is old and the front has one large glass window with a glass door beside it as the entrance. The old red paint is peeling and the sidewalk is decorated with vintage patio furniture, an old Antique coke cooler, some potted plants, many hand written signs on old chalk boards and dry erase boards, proudly spouting what you may find in this charming little shop downtown, for instance; homemade icecream, smoothies, sandwiches, antiques and ofcourse, coffee.
       This is the Shop Downtown coffee and eccentricities in the small little town of Schulenburg Texas.

       When naming the shop and adding eccentricities, I was mainly referring to all the eclectic antiques or odd old items you may find for sale or display along with all the yummy snacks and coffee, but little did I know at the time that the eccentricities would soon be referring to all the different people and personalities that would grace the door of the shop, sit upon it’s chairs and stools, visit and share their stories and lives within its old concrete walls.

       There are not many dull moments in the shop and some are so very colorful you may think that I must have a wild imagination and surely I am making these characters up as I go along.                   
      However, I could not take the credit for the entire flavor that these stories are full of and know that I could not have made up some of these characters if I had sat down and tried.            
      These people you will hear about, meet and enjoy are all real and have all on occasion or on a regular basis blessed the shop with their vigor, presence, laughter, tears and friendly banter and conversation.

       These are the chronicles of The Shop Downtown, and how one little tiny coffee shop full of eccentricities lures in from interstate I10 and the small surrounding towns, the most interesting of stories and people.    

The girl and a car

She walked in and quickly asked for a coffee. I asked her if she was hungry and would like something to eat and she said, “I don’t know, maybe.” She seemed tired and much likes someone who had been, or was on a long journey. She was a girl and a car and a long journey she was most definably on.  I went back to begin preparing her coffee and found myself extremely excited with anticipation and intrigue on getting to know her story. This girl and a car, as she so referred to herself on her blog site, was the most interesting part of my day.

She was from Northern Maine and had recently graduated from NYU with a degree in journalism and communication and left New York for the adventure of a life time, a major road trip. She was traveling alone, just this girl and her car, well now she was anyway. She had a travel companion but she recently flew back home, to get back to her job. She was only allowed two weeks off, unlike the girl and her car, which had a seasonal job of sorts and was allowed all winter off. In Maine winter lasts almost all the way through May. Here in Texas, it must seem like summer. It was an amazingly beautiful April day in Schulenburg Texas and in walked the girl and her car into The Shop Downtown. She had been traveling on I10 with her next destination to be Louisiana and detoured off the Interstate in a small little town called Schulenburg, where she also found a girl in a shop named Christine that also writes and was just starting a new blog.

Was it a Coincidence?

 I don’t think so.

The night before I had woke up around 2:00 a.m. and had heavy on my heart to start writing, “blogging if you will”, the interesting people that God seems to bring into The Shop Downtown. I knew that I had to start this immediately, but my intentions are always fairly good, and somehow life just seems to distract me. However, this day was different, because the obvious was so obvious that I could more likely fallen off the face of the Earth then not been obedient and write. So, write I am.

Her story, this girl and a car, is pretty simple. She is young, vivacious and just set off to the nation, and she could just leave, so she did.

“FREEDOM!”

 Now, how she ended up in my small coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, “ No Target having”, Schulenburg Texas, now that was God. He brought her in; I am completely convinced of it. She was on a journey, just like I am on a journey and he used our two journeys to encourage one another.           

We talked for hours. We asked questions and shared our love for writing. When I asked her the question, “Are you a writer?” she answered the same way I would have, she laughed and said, “I would like to call myself a writer, but don’t know if I should.” I am not sure what this meeting meant, but I like to call it a divine appointment. I don’t know if I will ever see the girl and a car again, but I do know that she made an impact on me. I began to write, that night, I began to write this, this simple little blog about the day the girl and a car came into the shop downtown. Again, I don’t know what it means, but I do know that the chance meeting that day moved something in my spirit that had fallen asleep and I began to write again. We are all on this miraculous journey and we are all connected in one way or another and if we will stay open to the voice of God and the strange ways that He may choose to communicate to us, it is an exciting adventure, fun and exciting!

So, today I close with the simple advice to “stay open to divine appointments that may be planned for you, for it will be in these simple appointments that you may truly hear the voice of God and travel further towards your destination.”  We are all on a journey and all need to take a road trip once in a while, whether it is hopping in our cars and taking off, or merely sitting in a shop and taking a journey with a young girl for a few hours as you visit sitting in a small coffee shop in a small town in the middle of nowhere.