Overheard at Mike's Café
Politics
Cerno seemed to have lost his wind.
There was a time as the Trump campaign had gained momentum, and early in his Administration, when a group of a half dozen right-leaning activists had emerged, apparently surfing on their ability to catch a swelling wave of social media opinion.
Each had his angle and theory on how to monetize social media as a platform. The idea was to carve out a niche and gain a following that could be quantified as clicks, shares and likes.
Some were ex-military intel officers, or journalists or lawyers. Some had made a career of writing commercial comic books and social satire, and branched into electronic publication of titles not in political favor by the progressives who seemed to dominate the verbal digital space. Some rose on a pseudonym, then suddenly disappeared as soon as they had gained an internet following, to remain only cited in retrospect, like a passed classical composer who seemed not to have survived into his full potential.
There were many moving parts to the evolving political opinion mill.
It became critical to understand timing and the news cycle, as well as the way, no matter how brutally violent or outrageous the news, amnesia would descend and stories hot enough to burn imagination one day, were vaguely remembered by the end of the week, like the momentary recollection of a forgotten dream.
* * *
I had been chatting amiably and noncommittally with the café owner.
“Mike, how is the tractor work going?”
“There is one area I haven’t been able to touch at our place, and the grass is this high,” Mike indicated between his spread hands. “It gets so boggy…”
“Tell me about it. I get stuck in the field this time almost every year…”
The glass door imprinted with the mirror image of the café name, and as the door opened, I recognized someone I knew from Browning Equipment, someone whom I had never seen at the café before.
“Hi, George,” I nodded as he came in blinking a moment in the dark interior.
He nodded, immediately turning to a racially nondescript middle-aged woman sitting on a high stool with her elbows on the table.
Mike continued from the table next to me.
“Still not able to connect to the internet? I get a strong signal,” he noted glancing and squinting over his pince nez at the smart phone in his left hand, right poised to tap at the keyboard.
“No luck,” I responded, a little annoyed.
“How do you like our new chairs?”
I looked over where he was sitting with coffee and a book and made the mute sign of the flat of my hand passing over my head, as if I had not noticed.
“Low flying plane?” he smiled.
“Are they wooden or steel frames,” I queried.
“Metal, but I don’t know what kind,” he replied, looking slightly suspiciously as George was locked in conversation with the woman across the room sitting at a table.
Mike was a kindly retired merchant marine officer who knew many of the major ports of the world. It did not require much imagination to see him as an old salt.
George turned from the woman at the table, and walked over.
“George,” I suggested. “Tell Mike about the four languages you speak…”
He was a slender, short man with long dark locks, and could easily have passed for an ethnic comedian of some sort, probably Jewish. That he worked behind the parts counter at the local tractor repair shop was remarkable, almost to the point of being suspect.
George had a ready wit, and a sense of humor that is instantly mistaken for intelligence.
George was not wearing his usual plaid shirt and jeans.
“People don’t recognize me in a suit and tie,” he grinned, and Mike smiled at George’s Slavic, but otherwise nondescript accent.
He seemed puzzled but rapidly turned to Mike, when it occurred to him what I was talking about: it was a comment he had made maybe two years earlier.
“I speak four languages: English, Bad English; Russian and Bad Russian.”
It was improbable but funny when spoken with that accent.
He stepped closer to the table where I had my opened laptop, coffee and notes spread out.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
I told him, then learned he was soliciting signatures for a petition for the Republican challenger for a seat on County Board of Supervisors . He seemed to insist I talk politics despite my reluctance to engage in any such discussions in public places. I knew how seriously liberal Mike and his wife Pat were, but I had always been careful to keep my bias to myself.
George kept at it, and it became increasingly annoying, despite the fact that I agreed with some of his political stance, even though it was always bad policy to discuss religion or politics in uncertain public environments.
I would have liked a serious, but private, political conversation about the Board of Supervisors race, but not then when I had other more pressing work to do, and not in that place.
The Café was my haven: I could be polite with a nod but there were few with whom I invited conversation unless pressed to the point of seeming impolite not to engage.
The internet was strong most of the time, but I favored off hours when there were few customers. During peak periods, the conversation and ad hoc off campus classes and discussion groups seemed to drift over from Patrick Henry College, a block or two away.
Even the baristas were often full-time undergraduates there. After a few years, it seemed by quietly sitting with a lap top, it was often possible to glean the character and concerns of most of the denizens of that particular café.
In some ways, Mike and Pat, and their girls who also worked the service counters, were like family. We seemed to share similar concerns, and what must have seemed to outsiders as an old fashioned social conscience, although from different ends of the political spectrum.
They knew they could count on my stopping in, early Sunday mornings, and that I was a quiet, soft spoken but occasionally lively customer.
The others I knew by the make and color of their cars, in some cases, their concerns and occupations, or former careers. It is good to blend into the furnishings and ambience without standing out, and the place suited me well to using its internet when the home system was unreliable or the power out.
There would be weeks when they would not see me when out of town work demanded I be elsewhere, and was preoccupied...