The slow and painful death of a coffee shop.

Fran's husband died fifteen years ago. He painted a lot of pictures of cows.
One day, Fran came in to Hava Java and hung those pictures. She was very meticulous about how and where the pictures should be hung. It started with two cows and a few smartly-placed paintbrushes. Then the cows became herded on the walls, eating grass, blue cows, purple cows, cows and disproportionately-sized roosters. And then she put up a biography on her dead husband, and an old picture. I think she must have taken it in the seventies. I think she wants to sell some of the paintings. I bet she is lonely, living wherever she lives, with a bunch of paintings of cows.

Fran is very clearly crazy and on a lot of illegal substances. She talks a lot about salvation and about Vietnam, especially if you are talking about things that are in no way related to salvation and Vietnam. But there is some light, or thread, that connects her ramblings to reality; if you reminded her, she could perhaps be re-calibrated to return to the locus that the conversation had spurred from.

I saw Fran outside of the coffee shop the last day I walked down there. The fair was going on, and it smelled like petting zoo five miles in any direction from the grounds. She was sitting outside and staring at a back copy of the New York Times. I asked her why Hava Java was closed, because usually Hava Java is only closed on Christmas. She told me it was Jesus and Vietnam, and adamantly swung her paper very close to my head. So I looked at a sign on the door. Hava Java was undergoing renovations. It would be open at nine a.m., although it did not specify what day at nine a.m. it would re-open.

I drove by for a few days. It was not open at nine a.m. or at any other time. New signs appeared on top of the old sign. Signs from the health department. Signs detailing stop-work orders, because the owners had not obtained a permit for construction. And a sign on top of all signs, thanking the loyal customers of Hava Java for voting it the best coffee shop in the Lehigh Valley area. Lots of signs, but no nine a.m. openings.

Hava Java has a following of people. Some are hipsters. Some are strung-out hippies. Mostly it is a group of 20-somethings who desperately look for intellectual solace in an abandoned steel town. They all lament that Hava Java has been closed for so long. They prophesy its impending doom. The owners have no money to pay the baristas, let alone reconstruct a coffee shop and pay off city fines. The health department has declared it not up to code. They all call for something to be done, for someone to lend money. None of them have any money except for the fifty cents they spend on playing pool at a local bar. And so they lament.

Fran has been wandering. I am not sure if her dead husband's pictures are still in the shop or not. But she seems to be keeping guard of something.