This is an Advent story, but it begins with an end. Because her
landlord upped the rent to an amount that would shame even the
villains in a Charles Dickens novel, the entrepreneur who runs
the best coffee house in my neighborhood will be closing its
doors on December 21st.
The business is called “Mr. Toad’s,” and as you might expect, its
name pays homage to Toad of Toad Hall, the most endearingly
egotistical animal in Kenneth Grahame’s century-old tale, The
Wind in the Willows. Gary Kamiya
calls Toad “one of the great comic characters in all
literature,” and “the little blowhard brother of Falstaff and Don
Quixote.”
Whether that sort of thing was on owner Stephanie’s mind when she
bought the business in 2004, I’m not sure, but she did more to
capitalize on the name than its previous owner had. Stephanie
gave Mr. Toad an American pedigree by nicknaming her mascot
“Norm,” and worked to ensure that coffee urns stood near a
terrarium, while the espresso machine was loosely flanked by
enough plastic and porcelain amphibians to form an infantry
platoon.
A web-footed sage once remarked that it’s not easy being green.
The closing of this store could be read as a cautionary tale in a
worrisome economy, but neither owner Stephanie nor manager Carrie
now reads it that way, and I am not one to disagree with two
beauties who would have been fitting subjects for a Renaissance
master like Titian,
especially when both women have startlingly quick memories and a
genius for empathetic small talk.
What hit me like a North Atlantic salmon wrapped in yesterday’s
News & Observer is that by dedicating themselves to
what Stephanie calls “coffee and coffee people alike,” she and
Carrie worked with similarly committed employees to create an
impressive reservoir of customer loyalty. This is and soon was a
coffee house where at least one patron spent Saturday mornings
writing a master’s thesis. Other regulars held meetings to create
a charter school, or enjoyed the company of friends after rosary
and bible study at the Catholic parish up the road.
As a member of the latter fraternity, I remember when one of our
number returned from a road trip to New York City with loaves of
Italian bread. Paisan that he is, Carl wanted to share that bread
with other customers at what we jokingly dubbed “Our Lady of
Toads,” and so we pressed a Swiss Army knife into service. Such
generosity was par for the course in the establishment where
Carrie sang carols last Christmas, and Stephanie donates a
portion of her profits to an agency that helps victims of
domestic violence.
I mentioned an Advent angle to the challenge that Mistress
Roaster and her manager now face, and it is this: Stephanie calls
the coffee house her church, and Carrie is a Christian whose
denomination I do not know, but both are buoyed by a joyful
confidence that hard things happen for a reason, and that
everybody in the coffee chain from producers to consumers
deserves respect.
Call it winsome conviction or adamantine sincerity, but by any
name, that attitude reminds me of angels who did not condescend
to shepherds, and blanket-wielding children who recite the
Christmas story from scripture on a school stage for their
bewildered friends. I am also reminded of the carol describing
how the boot prints of good King Wenceslas miraculously warmed
the feet of his servant when they crossed a snowy valley carrying
food to an impoverished peasant, and a little drummer boy whose
willingness to concertize for the Holy Family becomes more of a
gift than he even knows.
In short, while this story comes to you with a reckless disregard
for the convention of changing names to protect the innocent, and
its timing as an unsolicited plug is more than a little off, I
can’t ask a question like “Do you see what I see?” without trying
to show you what that is. In a year when so much of the economic
news is bad, I continue to learn from and be blessed by the
example of two people running a coffee house, one of them a peer,
the other young enough to be my daughter, both charming and
trustworthy. Their hope is orders of magnitude stronger than my
own, and I am thankful for that. As blogger Gerard Vanderleun
wrote recently in a related context, “We are all lying in the
mud, but some of us are looking at the stars.” He could not have
been more right.
