Saying Goodbye to Mission City

Yesterday, I dropped Callie off with my mom so I could take Lucia to her 2 month appointment. The crazy girl is almost 12 pounds and her head size is in the 96th percentile (but that's another post entirely!)
Anyway, as I was driving down The Alameda to get to 880, a route I don't usually take leaving my mom's, I took a peek over at my old stomping ground, Mission City Coffee and there was no welcoming neon open sign only a For Lease sign. My heart sank. My home was for lease! A great chunk of my high school, college and post college years were spent at Mission. I met some of my best friends there, worked with them and spent so many late nights there. I met my husband there under less than romantic ideals. I will never forget it. He was sitting at a table wearing (what I was told later was) a rock climbing helmet inside the shop. I walked up to him and told him he was inside you and he could take the helmet off. To which he crazily replied "You never know!!" I walked away shrugging my shoulders, thinking "What a weirdo." Certainly couldn't have predicted that I would have married said weirdo and had two gorgeous daughters with him! Mission was our place. More often that not, we ate a majority of our meals there through college. Mission is where I discovered just how good a hot pastrami sandwich could be and so much more. Mission was home.
When I really stop and think "What was Mission all about?" It was all about John Heller. John Heller was the original owner who found a werehouse type building and saw a place where people would come in and have a cup of coffee. But more than that, he saw a place where people would want to be. John taught me a lot. He showed me that it wasn't about your product, although a good product is important, it was about the connections you made with people over your product. People came in, I'd wager, more for the conversation and his warm Texan smile than the coffee. So much of himself and his family went into Mission and found a way to stay. From the names of his kids on the menu, Jeff's College education (a little dig to his son who just kept going back to school whether it was seminary or a phd program), Tom's 3 Pointer and Lizzie's Slice of Heaven (named for their daughter who sadly died much too young) to his wife's ridiculously good carrot cake and the delectable blueberry scones. Oh man how mad people got when we were out of scones and carrot cake! But I swear, the man must have had stock in 3M. Everything we did, we did on post it notes. If you wanted a job, you wrote your name and phone number on a post it. I wrote my information down for him no less than 5 times before he finally offered me a job. All of our coffee/food orders were on post it notes. The recipes in the back were probably on post it notes. I don't think you could find a person who didn't like John. I will never forget the day I was working with John and Valerie and John out of the blue asked in his Texas drawl "Hey Maria, how's your love life?" The way your dad would ask. We all laughed. I'm sure I told him something, who knows what was going on at the moment. Then he told us about caribou hunting. That was John. Always cared to give himself to you, to his customers, to his shop.

I have so many amazing memories of Mission. Meeting my college roommate Michelle there. Meeting Valerie there. And oh, the trouble we got into together! The costumes we wore to get better tips. Smoking outside on our breaks. Closing early because it was dead and well...because we needed to get to the bar! We would trade Valerie's coffee concoctions with the bartenders for one of their own concoctions. Working sunday mornings and snagging a scone hot out of the oven. It certainly wasn't for the tips. The sunday church crowd was notoriously stingy with tips. I remember working with Big Mike, Elisa, Alicia, Ricardo and so many others. Working with a girl ( I am killing myself trying to remember her name!) who was bipolar and dropped her medication into the chocolate one night. We scrambled trying to find them all! She refused to give pregnant women caffeinated beverages. A word to the wise, be very very nice to people in food service. They hold more power over you than you know! The regulars. Tony who gave me my first motorcycle ride. Bagel Boy. The first boy I was brave enough to give my number to, on a post it note (of course!) in a bag of bagels. Charlie. Kyle. Breck and Louis. Ike. Oh Ike. Somewhere we still have that CD.  Jim and his harmonica. The weirdos: The Ugly Shirt Squad, who we found out later were undercover cops scoping out the seedy  hotel across the street. Psycho Psychologist Man who hit on everything that moved with zero success. People ordering a non fat decaf latte that I dubbed "the why bother". The people that would be totally bitchy when asking "Ummm. I asked for extra hot?" And oh boy, did I give them extra hot!  Pretty sure it was nowhere near an enjoyable coffee drink at that point. Bill's horrendous concoction, The Revolutionary. Ugh. Disgusting. Learning that Bill and I could not and should not work together. When I close my eyes I can see every item on that glass counter. The gooey cream cheese covered carrot cake, the sour cream coffee cake (my favorite!), the oat hockey pucks, the white chocolate biscotti by Shari, the vegan cookies, the chocolate cake, the bagels, muffins and crossaints from the morning delivery, the old school diner style coffee cups stacked precariously for people wanting drip coffee. The rickety chairs, the copper bar, the pile of cigarette butts outside, the milk crates that doubled for chairs and tables out back, the kitchen where you better believe I worked on my spanish, the dirty spoons, the clang of the espresso wands being cleaned out, the cash register that was always breaking, the dripping honey jar and the sugar in the raw sprawled out on the bar.

When John told us he had sold the shop we were crushed and sad. Who would the new owner be? What would he be like? And why didn't he tell us so we could pool our money and buy it? That would be my continuing business fantasy for years to come. It still crosses my mind. Today I would buy it and make it super family friendly like Bumble in Los Altos. Call it Mission City Mamas. Valerie would serve her amazing pastries and desserts, I could do my jams. After John sold it I stayed on for a couple of more years but it was never the same. The new owner took short cuts, the food wasn't as good, the love wasn't there. John was gone. The family dispersed. And eventually I did too. I went back a few times here and there but there were fewer and fewer familiar faces. A couple of years ago one of my fellow teachers and I needed to crank out some Letters of Rec. Ugh. God do I not miss those! She said to me "Have you ever been to Mission City?" I'm pretty sure I laughed. So we went. I was glad to see Jeff was still on the menu. And Michelle's concoction, The Katmandu was still there. More expensive of course, but she was still there. John's chalkboard was still there as well as all of his vintage prints and the coffee print I bought for him when I saw it in Berkeley. The roaster coated with coffee oil, the bags of green coffee beans. I hope someone buys it and makes it a home again. Please, do not let it become Starbucks. That would be the ultimate insult to John. Especially since they tried so hard to take it from him for so long by trying to buy him out or to try to buy out the surrounding businesses, the laundromat, the pawn shop, the convenience store. I find myself wishing I had taken more pictures of my time in Mission, but I suppose its like taking pictures of the rooms in your house. You don't think to do it when you live there because you think it will always be there. But there is one picture I have that my grandma took when she came to visit. She knew to look for me at the coffee shop rather than at home:) Where she saw me and Valerie looking like this:

 

And that is how I will remember Mission. With stars on our heads dancing to The Pixies and Ani Di Franco while people looked at us, shook their heads and smiled.