A December morning at Prunedale's Coffee Lounge

I needed a few hours out of the house, so I went to hang out at our little store-front Coffee Lounge, run by Charlie, who used to work at the small grocery store in the same complex.  (Yes, I live in an area called Prunedale.  It used to be rural, but now amid the trailers, farms, and ranches dotting our eucalyptus-oak-pine-cypress hills are outbreaks of many little suburban streets and less-modest mansions.)  

This morning, it was raining, raining a lot.  It let me see that our gutters leak prodigiously -- yet another excellent reason to leave home.  And when I got to the coffee lounge, a gray mist was a solid sheet across the sky, enough to make it easy to imagine there was no other place in the world.  I grabbed a coffee and almond croissant, my book, and one of the eight inexpensive leather loveseats at the back of the fairly bare store -- and I quickly learned that this place was eavesdropper's heaven as Charlie and another guy named Frank discussed the most important things in the world: the ecstatic virtues of pizza, tacos, and old big-block muscle cars, with Frank punctuating every sentence with a joyful "Bro!" and Charlie responding with an equally enthusiastic "Boom!  Just like that!"  

It was just great.  Great, I tell you.