“CJ!” the woman cried out as she entered the coffee shop. I raised my head from the blueberry muffin I was eating and looked at her. She laughed, watched the expression on my face as I worked through recognition possibilities. It did not take me long to land on “Autumn!” We embraced, briefly, and I shook Matt’s hand. Before they left the coffee shop, I showed them an entry in my notebook: “7/17/15 — @ Golden Ace — Autumn and her husband, Matt.”
The year 2015 was early in my days spent at the Golden Ace. On that July day that I noted in my book, I was sharing the Golden Ace experience with a friend from St. Louis, and I was astonished to learn that Autumn remembered me from when she had worked at Lazy Daze, the Irvington coffee house that I frequented when I moved into the neighborhood. My surprise was because my “frequenting” was not that frequent. I sat at the bar at the Ace with my friend and Autumn, whose husband, Matt, served us. I shared stories with her and Matt — both poets, I was to find. A couple of months after that meeting at the Ace, I got a surprise in the mail: a letter, addressed to “Clement Woods III,” that would recall for me some of the delights of that July evening.
“Dea r Clement,” Autumn’s letter began, and I chuckled at the sight of those carbon-struck ink impressions, replete with extra spaces, misaligned keys, and the shadow characters of a manual typewriter. Autumn had pressed a specific set of keys that recalled the night we met, “a great time,” she wrote, “full of lofty thoughts, drink and a bit of song…” I’m not sure how much loft a drink-sodden thought can achieve, but I need little by way of liquid encouragement to break off a bit of song. (I’m also unsure as to when I gave Autumn my full “government” name, as well as my address at the Bolton Avenue and Julian Street apartment that I jokingly called a loft.)
I had a similar type of meeting at my new “office,” recently. (“The Office,” the Weekly View, April 17th, 2025.) Two people were playing darts and I was waiting for time on a pool table, when the dart-playing man turned to me and asked, “Do you still have that pink timer?” I laughed, and told him that I did, but that I had given it to my youngest granddaughter to use as a timer for her tooth brushing. The man turned to his companion and explained how, one night at the office, I had lent the timer to a pool player who had been irritating his companions with his over-long ruminations about which ball to pocket. I produced the timer and told the man, “When time runs out, you shoot at a ball.” Danny, the dart-player, was one of the irritated companions, and remembered my pink timer and — incidentally — my skill at the table. (*blush*)
I’ve been speaking with an old friend from St. Louis Missouri, and she tells me that she is “a writer,” and reads to me excerpts from her journals. We met in a tavern when she introduced herself and asked if I wanted to shoot a game of pool. We became friends, I was a groomsman in her wedding, and she wrote and sent me cards at holiday times.
Life is richer, not just for the great slabs of happiness, but the little bits of joy embodied in a chance meeting and letters, handwritten and typed, reminiscent of conversations in a tavern.
cjon3acd@att.net