Okay, I wrote this yesterday at Caffé Curio.  It's short.

I like Caffé Curio best on mornings like this, the sun golden, lazy, spilling in through the windows, a shaded brass lamp shining behind me.  The ceiling fans lope through their circles, round and round, casting shadows that flicker over my wooden table.  It is already shaky, even without the indecisive shade.  The chairs are mismatched, and mostly empty.  At ten or eleven in the morning it is a different café from the nighttime hangout, where current alternative rock blasts and theater and English majors gather to raucously talk shop, and neighbors play violent card games.

Mornings, the people who stand behind the counter making coffee play Mozart or the folk-rock I love -- long strings of Dylan or DiFranco, obscure artists from Canada or Peru, a little of everything.  It soothes me.  I know the morning people -- not by name, but well enough for easy small talk.  I come to study, sometimes alone, sometimes with my Spanish-major friends, the blonde divorcee going back to school, the girl from Japan; we drink house blend (or on Mondays, Rise-and-Shine, with extra caffeine) and speak a variety of languages.  Often we see our professor stopping in after class, on the way to her office.  She loves this place as well.

Sometimes I write letters.  Sometimes I just come and bring a book and sit and read for hours, nursing a cappuccino with amaretto or an Italian soda.  It is sunny and pleasant.  I feel like the place attracts arty types, creative types, angsty types.  I wouldn't be surprised if Lorca himself, god of Spanish theater, strolled in one day -- not assassinated at all, but hiding from his enemies, warped out of time and drifting in obscurity through Pennsylvania coffee shops.  We would sit at one of these rickety, unstable tables and talk about writing and sun and coffee and family.  I shall miss this place when I am gone.