We are in a small coffee and sandwich place housed in a former two-bay service station in Richmond, Virginia. Boxes of paper goods and food service supplies are piled almost to the ceiling. Everyone who has ever been here has taped a business card to the wall. They are the usual suspects: real estate agents and Reiki practitioners, computer geeks and Kundalini yoga instructors, pet sitters and psychoanalysts. They all come here.

They sit on a not-so-clean fringed velour sofa and mismatched lumpy chairs that have seen better days. If they’re eating, they sit at old wooden or Formica tables with chairs that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s kind of cute and somehow comforting. The people here are mostly half my age. They are amazingly pierced and tattooed and some white kids even sport dreadlocks. They wear baggy clothes and look comfortable with each other. It is a little utopian and a little suspicious, this contentment.

The sandwich maker with the pierced lip has forgotten to put either mayonnaise or mustard on my turkey on oat grain bread and I nearly choke on the rich-in-Omega‑3 flax seeds. The grinding, minor-chorded repetitive music almost makes me want to shoot myself, but no one else seems to notice. I am getting old. The decaf coffee is terrible and I put honey in as fast as I can get it to pour out, even though I never sweeten my coffee. My Weight Watchers leader would be horrified, but it’s about survival here. My husband, Tim, drinks hi-test, so he doesn’t get how bad this really is. 

I look across the table to see Tim, eight years my junior, growing misty eyed. Always the anti-capitalist (except when he’s working as an investment manager), I suspect that this is what he longs for: a chipped-cup-recycling-crazed-save-the-world-all-you-need-is-love lifestyle. And I cringe because I wanted that, too, once upon a time. And part of me still believes in it, but through a slightly jaded lens now, having actually lived through the Sixties and all the good, bad and unprecedentedly ugly we have lived through since.

Days later, I still can’t shake the feelings I had in that coffee shop. Am I too old? For sure. Apologetic? To an extent. Spoiled? Maybe. Skipped over? Maybe that, too. Middle class? You bet. A little too hip and trendy? Sometimes.

So where do I go now? I’ve never stopped thinking that love is all you need or that we should give peace a chance. I just grew up and had to make a living because nobody was ever there for me until now. Tim is here now. Is the time for change now? Is it farmhouse-in-the-country-let-my-hair-go-grey time now? I don’t know.

I’m going down to the Crossroads again. I’ll make sure I get what I want this time.