The Life Section

There is much written now about "the third place," that place where you go when you're not at work or at home, that other place where you feel comfortable and welcome. Starbucks stressed this. I remember in my interview I had to describe what makes a good third place and how I would contribute to making Starbucks that place for every one of our customers. Smile, greet them, ask them questions, make sure everything is clean, say goodbye.

But, though I miss the people I worked with at Starbucks (it's wildly been over a year since I worked there), it can't be my third place. I'm too familiar with it, and the lines are too harsh: tile floor, echos of the espresso machine, no corners to hide in. No, I need an anonymous, quiet place. And that, as I've mentioned here before, is Panera Bread on the west side.

I got there this morning around 8am, the perfect time on a weekend morning. There were only a few people sitting with their coffee, books, spouses. The music was not yet on, so the room felt hushed, as if we'd all just woken and were shuffling slowly into the dining room as siblings. I ordered oatmeal, a bagel, and coffee and went to my usual table for two near the window, as I like to look out in between pages and bites. This morning, I watched the rain collect in black puddles on the parking lot and read from Pulphead, essays about brothers in blood and literature.

As I waited for my oatmeal, I paused at an empty table and pulled the Life section from the pile of papers left by someone already there and gone. I knew my friend Steve would be featured by my friend Andrew today, so I found the article and stood there reading, then took it back to my table to finish it as I ate. The papers were gone when I went to put it back in the pile, but I noticed a couple nearby had taken it to share at their booth. Like a daughter passing her favorite section down the table to her parents, I placed Life on their pile and said "Here's the other section," smiling, and returning to my table.

A few minutes later a couple came in looking for a table with access to an outlet. A gentleman popped his head over a partition and said the corner booth has one. The man looked around at the corner behind me and said, "I don't see it." My mouth was full, so I waited to point it out until I would be legible. His wife then came over, scanned the wall, and said, "I don't see it either." "Along the baseboard," the man behind the partition called. I pointed, after a gulp, "It's black, it blends in." The woman looked again, her head moving quickly from one side of the wall to the other. "There, between the two tables on the bottom," I said, gently, as to my grandmother, and she finally sighed, "Oh!"

It's for moments of small connections in the quiet of a Sunday morning, over coffee and bagels, sometimes the windows spotted with rain, that I come here. I know no one, and no one knows me, but we come together in the most intimate time of day to be quiet alone or with a loved one, to share papers and help one another find what we're looking for. A family of strangers, if I've ever felt one.

By the time I leave just after nine, the booths in the main part have started filling, the music--mostly instrumental--marks the start of day, and no one says goodbye when they leave, the spell broken but taken with us to carry out the hours of Sunday and the noise of moments in the rush outside.