This week’s San Diego Momma freewrite is: describe a lovely (or horrible, if you run that way) drink you shared with a lover/friend/enemy/etc. The drink could be wine or coffee or Jamba Juice. BUT, the drink should have been life-changing in some way. Share the story as a vignette, poem, one-liner, however you like.

The following has little to do with the assignment, as sometimes happens. (Okay, it seems to happen to me a lot. What’s your point?)

Lone Drinkers
In my teenage years of waiting tables, there were many lone drinkers. The man with the loud but quaking voice who ordered dry brown toast and coffee each morning. The one who sat tucked in the corner each evening and finished his half liter of house wine before ordering his dinner. The woman who drank her milky tea with a hot turkey sandwich on white toast, white meat only, mashed potatoes on the side.

One of the old men who spent his days moving from coffee shop to coffee shop had a dog. I don’t remember what the man looked like now, but I remember the dog. It was white and sturdy, like a weightlifter turned heavy in old age. He had a black nose and one blind eye. And he followed the man from restaurant to restaurant, waiting patiently on the sidewalk, untied but unmoving.

“It was an old dog and he was an old man and they found each other,” my dad said one evening in an uncharacteristic bit of poetry, as we passed the pair on main street.