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Directory    The Hiawatha Room: A place to relax, read the bulletin board, check on the weather. The Diner Room: Find something good to eat. Friends: See what visitors have sent in for you to look at, read or just enjoy. The Neighborhood: There's a bookstore and a hobby place nearby.

Here's a little background about the Coffeedrome , with pictures and poetry as well. Read on, you'll see.

Coffeedrome started out as a dream, an actual coffee shop that would never close, always ready to serve the customer with whatever the customer might need. The original idea was to remodel the former railroad station in Cold Spring, New York, to accommodate it. The dreamer (the person writing this) eventually realized that the Coffeedrome would never exist in real life because of the time, effort and expense needed to bring it about. But along came the Internet and the opportunity to create a VIRTUAL Coffeedrome. This is it. So the visitor is asked to use her imagination a little bit and accept the idea that despite outward appearances, railroad stations in four communities (Asheville, NC; Cold Spring, NY; Duluth, MN, and Holly, MI) are believed to harbor Coffeedromes, offering food, shelter, music, reading and comfort around the clock for all travelers who find their way inside. Here is a poem that expresses the hope for what the Coffeedrome should and could be:

(To listen, click here) Pause She died she thought, she was surprised to find a waiting room, a resting place, a cup of coffee on the counter, music drifting through the air, it’s Patsy Cline and Artie Shaw it’s Benny Goodman. Shall I turn it down a bit, the owner wondered, would you like a bite to eat, some eggs and toast, some onion rings, some soup, some apple pie to go with that, tomorrow’s paper, yes tomorrow’s paper. Wait a minute where exactly am I. It’s o.k. the owner said, it’s cold outside it’s warm in here, it’s hot outside we’re always cool, it’s wet we’re dry. We’ve got some books, a leather couch to curl up in in the Hiawatha room. We haven’t got a television, people say they never miss it once they’re safely in the door. We’ve got a radio however, late at night we sometimes pull in Pittsburgh or Saint Louis, on the shortwave set we get the BBC, the pilots on their way to Gander. The pictures on the wall were oddly personal she thought, the drinking fountain from her playground, bubbler from the Wauwatosa bus stop where the driver was surprised to find a 12 year old at 6 a.m. on Christmas. There were racing cars and saxophones and family picnics, fire trucks and bicycles and trains, she was astonished by the trains. This used to be a pretty busy place the owner said, the morning rush, the same at six, the stragglers after midnight. Another woman looking at the pictures saw a garden near her mother’s house, the sunset off the coast of Ecuador, her favorite horse, an early morning view of Machu Picchu, butterflies she’d studied as a child, and then the man who walked in as she sipped her coffee ambled over for a closer look. The photos on the wall were clearly his, his bowling team, his barbershop quartet, the day they took the elm tree from his yard, his high school prom, his ’37 Hudson Terraplane. The owners held each other’s hand as someone left to catch the train, it comes at six, it’s never late, it’s always heading west. Sometimes it’s crowded sometimes not, the people are relaxed, they’ve waited all their lives for this, they’re safe on board, they take a seat. The extra day or year they spent inside the Coffeedrome, the name the owners gave it in a dream one year, the time inside was beautiful. They wave goodbye, they blow a kiss, it’s always open never closed. r.e.s. 6.14.96 . . .   . . . More Coffeedrome poems