I used to go every day to a small dark coffeehouse to read Latin poetry.  The bike ride was perilous because the panniers were stuffed with hardcovers: Lewis and Short (a Latin dictionary), Allen and Greenough (a Latin grammar), .and Horace’s Ars Poetica (a poem about literary criticism). 

I often read in public in those days.  I was forlorn, new in town, and though I did not want to have a sad aura, I probably did.  One hot summer day, a man asked, “Has school started?”  I looked at him dazed but then realized he was funny and cracked a bewildered smile.

Actually, he was the kind of hipster we all like to hang out with.  He had a radio show about bicycling.  And, like me, he didn’t wear a helmet, which is not nerdy, but super-hip, and we discussed it endlessly. He even gave me a compliment: “My high school Latin teacher was hot, too.”

 I got a chuckle out of that:  a Cuban colleague who taught Spanish and had been married five times, twice to the same woman, used to tell me that when I was in my thirties. Give a girl a pair of glasses, a Latin book, and faded jeans, and you’re set for a decade or so with hipster boyfriends. 

And then one day I met another lost soul at Starbucks, who said, “I can live anywhere that has a Starbucks and Target,” and then burst into tears.

“Maybe try another coffeehouse?”

I saw her there once.  She didn’t find the hipsters charming. “Doesn’t he smell?”  she asked about a handsome hipster artist.

“A bit?”

Alas, the hipster bicyclist moved away, the handsome hipster artist died, the hipster woman who looked like Morticia Adams started a rival coffeehouse, and the hipster owner of the dark coffeehouse sold (out).

After all, Emerson wrote about self-reliance.  I make coffee at home now.