Get your fix

Monday, apparently, is not everyone’s favorite.

At 6:30 on a recent Monday morning, when I showed up at the Weatherstone—or Old Soul at the Weatherstone, as it’s properly called now—there was one guy enjoying coffee on the patio. Inside, the Midtown coffeehouse was well lit but empty, save for Terry, the guy who opened the place. The sinuous Jamaican skank of “Pressure Drop” by Toots & the Maytals was blaring on the house sound system, always a good sign.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Ah, it’s Monday. They’ll start arriving pretty soon,” Terry answered as he poured me a cup of coffee.

My ride in began an hour earlier; I pedaled through the Sac State campus and over the Guy West Bridge to get on the American River Parkway bike trail. It was unseasonably warm but sweetly Transylvanian, with wisps of fog hanging across the foliage, still gray or silver in the early morning darkness.

At the Mile 6 turnoff to Cal Expo, the eastern sky began to lighten up, and the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees. Surprisingly, I encountered only three other riders—one at Sac State and two on the bike trail. After passing beneath the Business 80 overpass and then the Southern Pacific trestle—the rebuilt one that burned last year—there was a section of trail along a particularly fetid stretch of swamp. The pisslike miasma of ammonia was pungent enough to kill any lingering fog, and it was a chore to breathe. Fortunately, the aroma of hot coffee will banish the memory of even the most vile olfactory indiscretion, and it did.

I asked Terry about the rumor of beer and wine being offered for sale at the Weatherstone, to complement the place’s expanding portfolio of menu items.

“We got turned down. One guy in the neighborhood objected,” he said. Then he pointed to several memos and a letter, affixed to a column in front of the counter, which stated the Weatherstone’s case. “We’re appealing,” he added. “A lot of our customers would like [beer and wine].”

A little before 7 a.m., two men sat down and began talking, with animation and hand waving, about the Kings blowing the San Antonio Spurs game in the final seconds. Their attitude seemed more like bemused acceptance than the disgust of frustrated fans entitled to a championship. Ah, but the season is still early, and hope may be revived.

A few bike riders brought their Cannondales safely inside before they got caffeinated. Then Peter Keat, proprietor of Time Tested Books up the street, stopped in for a morning cup. I asked him how things were progressing for him in our currently roaring economy.

“Business is hanging in there. You never know what the next day will bring,” he said.

By 8 a.m., the place was quiet. “St. Stephen” by the Grateful Dead percolated quietly in the background, behind the noise produced by the espresso machine, and a lone redhead yawned while doing homework two tables over.

I’d been hoping some semblance of the old Weatherstone gang of grumpy old men might arrive to read the morning paper and hash over the day’s politics, but no one showed.

Maybe they don’t like Mondays.