COFFEE SHOP GIRL [Sat, 7-20-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—COFFEE SHOP GIRL [Sat, 7-20-24]

 

Following up on the recent column about Coffee Time…

I like to sing as I do stuff. I try to fit the song to the activity. Sometimes there is not a logical theme song, though. Like taking out the trash. So I create a song for the occasion. Taking out the trash, taking out the trash, we are not rejoicing, taking out the trash… You have probably figured out that it’s to the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Of course, you can also take out the trash to the Lone Ranger song: To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump…

So I needed a coffee song for the mid-morning coffee time Helen and I do. I went to the internet.

First was a Frank Sinatra hit of 1948, “There’s a Whole Lot of Coffee in Brazil.” It has the wonderful line, You date a girl and find out later/ she smells just like a percolator. Who under the age of 80 even knows what a percolator is?

So I decided to write a coffee song myself: I went down to the coffee shop, to sip a brew or two/ To admire the barista’s lovely smile and her new hairdo… Not something worthy of Sinatra. So, back to the internet…

Ah, a Sarah Maddock song, “Coffee Shop Bop.” Basically gentle rap. The singer goes to the coffee shop and admires the pants another girl is wearing, and… well, you’ll have to look it up, because I stopped listening at that point. It made me think of the girl at The Moose Jackson Café in Iron Mountain, MI.

She was new. She looked to be about twenty, so was probably a college girl just home for the summer. Exceptionally pretty. Blond hair in a ponytail. Great figure. Pink t-shirt, and pink shorts, what I could see of them. The table kept me from seeing her legs, but I saw a snow-white sneaker beneath. A really pretty girl put together in a delightful way.

Then she got up to go get some more coffee. I saw both white sneakers. And all of her short pink shorts. But… she had a metal leg. From shoe to shorts. Not a looks-like leg, but a long, complicated metal rod. She had one perfect normal leg, and one…well, I guess it was perfect, too, perfect for its purpose.

With no indication she thought there was anything unusual, she got up, filled her cup, returned to her books. I was thankful she didn’t look my way. I was afraid my shock might show. That metal leg just looked so out of place.

There had to be a story, and it was probably terrifying. Whatever it was, though, it was not the story she was now living. She didn’t need two fleshly legs to be a pretty girl in a coffee shop. She just needed another cup of coffee.

So, I guess I’ll have to start my song over: I went down to the coffee shop, hung my feed cap on a peg/ stopped to admire a pretty girl’s smile, and her metal leg…

John Robert McFarland