The regulars of the Oxford Coffee Company

By Audrey Davis, News Editor

James Beare and Bill Baker sit outside of Oxford Coffee Company wearing winter coats and gloves with coffees in hand. It's a chilly Monday morning. The temperature is barely above freezing, but the bright sun makes it seem a little more bearable.

There are no open chairs out front, so Bill hurries inside to grab another chair for me because "we can do things like that here," he says.

James and Bill have been coming here for the past two years. They can be found sitting in the same spots on almost any given weekday.

It happened naturally. It wasn't like they planned to become the regulars.

"You would come here after you took Belinda to work," Bill says. "And then you told me about it, and I was like, 'that sounds like fun!'"

"So we just started meeting here."

Both Bill and James worked in King Library under James's wife, Belinda.

The two have been friends for 35 years, give or take.

They both laugh, thinking about the early days of their friendship. Their laughter is one of the reasons they choose to sit outside.

"Sometimes our conversations get strange."

"A raucous laughter."

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"A lot of laughter! And a lot of happiness."

"There's something about sitting here like this. It's cold, but the sun is warm. It's just very pleasant."

There are two other "regulars" who join them on occasion, but they'll talk to anyone who walks by.

"I love talking to people. How about you, Bill?"

"Well, I'm not as open as you. James doesn't know a stranger."

Often, the men will have a book of poetry sitting out with them. They'll read poems to each other and talk about various other pieces of literature while sipping their coffees.

Bill pulls out a book from his coat pocket: "The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry."

"See, he brought his book."

We sit in silence for a few seconds, taking in the sights and sounds around us.

"I hope the train goes by soon for you," James says.

"You get the Doppler effect out here. Just listen to the cars drive by."

"Conversation stops depending on the noises. We've learned to talk in between the train whistles. As the train toots, we stop, and we know when it's going to start again. So yeah, I guess that does make us regulars."

I start to tell a story before I'm interrupted by an exchange of "good mornings." Gene Metcalf pulls up a chair and joins us.

"You're writing about old guys? Old farts who sit around with nothing better to do in their lives? Terrific!"

I ask Gene if he comes here regularly, too.

"Oh, very seldom. I don't like these guys at all! Maybe once every couple of months."

We all laugh out loud.

Gene comes here all the time, too. He's a retired American studies professor.

"We do have a few rules though," Gene says with a straight face. "You cannot be in the group unless you have a beard."

They all look at me and laugh. Looks like I don't stand a chance.

Katie, the barista, momentarily interrupts our conversation and places a coffee and a muffin in front of Gene.

"We seek coffee for community," James says. "We seek coffee as a replacement for all of the things we used to take into our bodies, so this replaces a lot of things that I probably shouldn't have had in the first place. But it's all good."

Although, they have been known to have an occasional Irish coffee.

"But other than that," James says, "it's all coffee and community."

Our conversation jumps from one topic to the other. There's not a natural flow. They just say whatever comes to their minds.

Gene talks about what it's like to be retired. He speaks philosophically, just how you would expect a professor to speak.

"You have to think about what you want to spend the rest of your life doing," Gene says. "A lot of people have done a lot and wondered whether it was worth the doing. Retiring gives you the opportunity to think about your other options. What's it like to define yourself in terms of not your job?"

"Being," says Bill.

"Not being bound by a schedule," James says. "Well, except for regular doctors' appointments!"

"It's always summer vacation."

"Was it hard to adjust at first?" I ask them.

"Nope. Not for me!" James immediately replies.

"Yeah. Yeah for me," Gene says, looking down at his cup of coffee.

In fact, he's still not completely adjusted.

For James, retiring was the best feeling. He retired on his December birthday. The next morning he woke up and realized he didn't have to get up if he didn't want to. He could stay inside and avoid the cold.

"But I got up. I fed the birds. And I eventually ended up here," James says. "Every day I get up and think, 'I don't have to do anything.' It makes it so relaxing to come here and not have any tension."

They talk about cars. They talk about travel. They talk about food. And they talk about each other.

"There was this French philosopher in the 19th century who set up a number of American utopias," Gene says. "The central idea was that people should do what they want to do rather than what the society says they should do. If people did what they wanted to do, they would find occupations that were well suited to them."

Gene says that there are enough passions in the human animal that everything that needed to get done would get done. The biggest problem that the philosopher found was that people had difficulty actually discovering what it was they wanted to do.

"We've been so socialized in terms of gender roles and status of class and money and everything else," Gene says. "We really don't know what we want to do. It's difficult to discover."

"Well, then you take the opposite approach and name everything you don't want to do!" James says.

I sit with them for a while more. We talk about different professors at Miami. We talk about Dave Chapelle's "SNL" monologue. We briefly talk about politics.

James only has one thing to say on that: "America, you've been hacked." More laughter.

We talk about life and about sunrises and road trips. I find myself looking forward to the day where I can sit with a group of friends and talk about anything and everything over a good cup of coffee.

I get up to leave, not wanting to interrupt their daily routine anymore.

"Have a great day, Audrey!"

I shake their hands and get in my car. In my rearview mirror, I see the regulars sipping their coffees and leaning back in their chairs from laughing too hard. I can't help but smile as I drive away.