Starbucks, Vero Beach, FL

On a warm, overcast New Year's Eve, there's no one, besides myself, sitting in the coffee shop...oh wait, just kidding...a young dad just sat his two year-old daughter down at a table so she can eat a chocolate cookie the size of her face.

Who?

Twenty minutes later, a couple people have decided to sit and kill time, including an older man in the comfy chair next to me. His salt and pepper hair, mostly salt, dons a very neat comb over and thick, white sideburns reach nearly to his mouth. He crosses his leg over one knee cradling an iPad with a thick, gray cover. He wears crisp white Reebok's with gray trim, khaki shorts and a navy polo shirt with a pocket on the front. His legs have virtually no hair on them, but a few scratches line his legs from what look like dog. He sits in the chair for no more than 15 minutes. I don't think he even finished his drink. He carefully folds up his iPad, grabs his Starbucks gift bag and his drink and walks out to his shiny, silver Ford Taurus. He opens the backdoor first, sits the bag and the iPad in the backseat, and shuts the door. He gets in the driver's seat and takes another two or three minutes to prepare for the drive. As he finally pulls out and drives away, I see a political bumper sticker neatly placed on the left, bottom corner of the windshield.

The Story.

John grew up in the Mid-West. That's where he learned to live his life--in a precise order and that's how he expects others to live theirs as well. After he was all grown, or so he thought he was, he went to a state university. He didn't involve himself in the pettiness of Greek Life or Student Affairs; he just made a few close friends here and there and quietly received his degree in exactly 4 years. He moved to Chicago, and began working as an accountant for a law firm. He stayed there for the thirty years. He watched as the firm grew from two associates to fifteen. He accounted for every cent, watched the firm's worth quadruple, and rarely, if ever, made a mistake. At 28, he married a pretty girl he had known in college named Elizabeth, but he called her Lizzy. She had majored in art history and was now a curator at the art institute. He loved how Lizzy could look at a painting and see a beautiful story when all he could see were slashes of paint and crooked lines. He watched the city grow and wane, ebb and flow. He loved Chicago, but knew, when the time came, that he would retire and leave the city to the young. Thirty-five years later, he owns a small house by the beach, where Lizzy still cooks dinner nearly every night, except on Wednesday evenings when they go to the Lobster Shanty for seafood.