In a Little Cafe

I'll call it Mindy's, though that's not the actual name of it. I never quite fit in at Mindy's the way I did at the other cafes. Mindy herself was more than a little stand-offish, although her employee Rachel was warm and kind. Over time, I gently reached out to Mindy until there was some rapport, but it only went so far.

It soon came to pass that Mindy could no longer afford to employ anyone and her cafe was manned solely by herself and her family. Often I would patronize the concern only to find myself in a tight space dominated by a family picnic that made no effort to embrace me, as though I had paid $6.00 for tea, cake and a slender gratuity and not for the customary friendly ambiance of a Seattle cafe. It was hard to take, and it encouraged me to make my best effort to reach out one last time today. It wasn't pointed, and I didn't get the feeling that it had anything to do with me when, after a time, the family vacated the building and sat down at a picnic table outside. In fact, a little girl invited me to come out and sit with them, but when I did her grandmother intoned at me, "Generally an official invitation comes from an adult, not from a seven-year-old!" I went back in to find Mindy at her table working at a computer. I said, "I'll give you guys an extra tip to smooth things over." She said, "OK." I put the dollar in the cup. I said, "I think I really annoyed your mother," and quickly related the tale. "I don't feel like I can come back, at least not while she's around," I concluded. Mindy encouraged me to ignore her mother's behavior, which was a kind enough gesture to make me wonder if I might return after all, if only for a token coffee to go.

But the truth is, it's not just about some cantankerous old lady; the whole ambiance of the place is cliquish and cold. Eating there is like trying to sit with the mean girls in high school. I don't want to blame Mindy because (a) I kind of like Mindy and (b) as her mother's daughter she must have made some effort to learn to be more open, gregarious and -- let's face it -- better mannered than the tree that dropped the apple. But I don't relish subjecting myself to that atmousphere when, for a mile's walk, I can enjoy a welcoming atmousphere at her competitors' shoppes.

When it comes to cliquish behavior, there are two camps. My camp tells children, "Never play games where someone else is left out." I'm getting a certain impression about the other camp, the one that cranks out people like Mindy's mom. I think that they are seldom heard from in the context of this kind of conversation (a) because they're caught up in their own cliques, relatively unconcerned with strangers and their ongoing global conversations and (b) because by nature they're fragmented into little cliques, disinclined to present a united front on any issue. Instead, it's my camp who portrays the other, in movies like the aforementioned "Mean Girls" and "Revenge of the Nerds."

If you want to hear from a cliquish person you have to be friends with one. And I actually do have a friend like that, so I can get his insight on it. (The insight is basically that he doesn't want the responsibility of admitting everyone into his sphere of relevance.) But when he ignores someone I don't go along with it.

The divisive nature of this issue is so pronounced as to produce a curious situation in my old neighborhood in Pennsylvania. It seems that there is one YMCA where people go to stick with their own posse, and another where people say it's not like that and they can go there to socialize. It's like one culture rules one space and another domitates the other.