Tuneless Chairs

While I typically buzz around different coffee shops throughout the Twin Cities, for the past couple months, I’ve buried myself in the blossom of Cahoots almost every day. Cahoots has the most perfect atmosphere for serious study - from chairs to temperature to people - Cahoots is wonderful! But I’ve started to feel I’ve been spending too much time there, probably averaging 4 or more hours each day.

So today I’ve come back to my long-lost Wedge neighborhood favorite, Caffetto. It’s a lovely day in here, sunny, not crowed, a cascade of rhythms flowing from the speakers at just the right level. But something's missing. The flower chairs are gone!! One reason I use to come here so often is because they had very cozy yet upright chairs. True, these chairs would not win any points for pleasing the eye. The chairs were covered with a flower patterned plastic upholstery. The pattern consisted of early 80’s- era dull puke colors – avocado green, a light brown and a pastel pink, all sullied with the years of gook that had accumulated on the sticky surface. Most of these chairs had ripped at some point during their tenure, and out of their gashes spewed tangled masses of a crunchy filling that looked like Spanish moss. So yes, the flower chairs were ugly, ugly as hell. More grimy, even, than the dilapidated chairs of the erstwhile Someday Cafe in Sommerville. But something about them just fit me so well. For the way I sit, they were some of the most comfortable working chairs I’ve found in the Twin Cities. Even more comfortable than Cahoot’s legendary orange cradlers.

The new chairs don’t have any personality yet. Hard wood backs, a bit too low and too curved for me. Red vinyl-covered seats, no gashes. No flowers.