(Not) a Room of One's Own

Starbucks is where I roam

Counter Culture: “My” desk at the Starbucks of Dobbs Ferry New York. The document at the left is a list of captions for the book I was finishing; the book at the right (Abigail Schrier’s Bad Therapy) was casual reading at the time.

I have a very nice office in my home. I’ve had one ever since I was a graduate student, creating bookcases out of pine boards and cider blocks. My current one houses our History collection (my wife has all our fiction in her office at Sarah Lawrence College; there’s a range of miscellany in our basement. I shudder to think about what we’re going to do when it’s time to downsize). I spend a fair amount of time in that office, whether it’s a matter of paying bills, answering correspondence, checking on the news—or, occasionally, writing installments of this newsletter.

One thing I don’t do in my office is write books. For the last fifteen years, I’ve done this at Starbucks. I’ve been a habitué of a series of stores in my immediate vicinity (Yonkers, Ardsley, Scarsdale, sometimes more than one a day) but in recent years have settled into a shop in Dobbs Ferry, about a mile from my house. As you might imagine, I’m a familiar face—the baristas and I know each other, chat companionably, and receive more than my fair share of free drinks. There are also plenty of other regulars among the clientele; every once in a while a kindly bemused visitor will note the stack of books I bring with me and ask if I’m writing one, or note the recently published novel—I’ve always got something going for fun whether or not I’m doing research—and express pleasure in having read it or expressing a desire to do so. Sometimes I jostle for elbow room at the long time at which I like to sit with the girls’ soccer team of the nearby Master’s School, or the coffee klatch of retirees who talk of their travels and their frustrations with Donald Trump while I track down that damn quote I want to use but can’t seem to locate in that earmarked biography beside me. The music can be a little loud, the crowds can be a little large, and the air-conditioning will often be blasting in February. And it’s sometimes hard to rouse myself on a cold winter’s night to make the trip. Yet I do, weeknight after weeknight, weekend after weekend, summer after summer.

I don’t suppose it’s hard to see why: writing is solitary work. (I do a lot of it in bed, stringing together sentences and paragraphs that will be typed onto a computer screen the next day.) It’s also restless work—I get up and pace the parking lot, make calls to friends and family, check out the new restaurant that’s opened up adjacent to the movie theater (this Starbucks is part of a hotel and retail complex beside the Saw Mill Parkway). I’ve always been partial to village environments that offer a modicum of community, and routines that provide continuity and structure for it. I realize a lot of this is temporary and illusory, which does little to lessen my attachment to it.

Time is such a formless, uncertain, and yet finite commodity. I sometimes wish I had a little more imagination in the way I deploy it. But these arrangements, however parochial, do allow my mind to wander. In that realm, in my modest way, I’m a bit of an adventurer.