It's a small honky tonk world after all

Sitting in Starbucks (I know, I feel like a traitor to all my favorite coffee shops visiting the "evil empire," but it's the only place within walking distance) with a grande soy latte sprinkled with cinnamon and chocolate, waiting for my car to be repaired at Pep Boys. I didn't want anyone to think my life is all lounging on my patio watching the play of light on the San Jacintos. I have a day off and how do I spend it? Waiting for my brakes to get fixed.
Starbucks does do some things very right, though. Take the music, for instance. At this moment it's Iron and Wine with Calexico. "There's a prison, on Route 41...." Outside sits a man in his 60's, beard fringing his chin like an Amish, set up to spend the entire day at his table. You buy a coffee at Starbucks and the table belongs to you for as long as you wish. He reads, he naps, he glares at the customers going in and out. People avoid sitting in that part of the patio though it's easily the shadiest, breeziest, most desirable part. He looks challenging, possibly unpleasant, non-pastel.
The closest customer is a young father, sitting on a bench with his coffee and his baby daughter. His soul patch, flat-brimmed backwards Raiders hat and sagging jeans look out of place with the delicate, button-eared baby in his lap. As Chuck Berry would say, "It goes to show you never can tell."
The latte is starting to revive me from the hangover haze of a very fun yesterday. I drove the hour to Redlands to work in the morning, knocked off early and continued west another hour to Oceanside for some afternoon boogie boarding, drove back to Palm Springs through rush hour traffic, and still had the energy to drive Mary up to Pioneertown in the high desert for blues at the famous honky-tonk, Pappy and Harriett's. What a day!
I-215 from Redlands to Oceanside was lined with colorful wildflowers: orange and yellow poppies, purple lupine, pink verbena. I tried to imagine what California must have looked like in the spring before it was covered by farms, houses, malls and parking lots. My best wave was five feet of creamy jade, precisely the color of a monarch butterfly chrysalis. The drive to Pioneertown was memorable too -- up into the joshua trees, a sky the color of mangoes behind jagged ridges of haphazardly-piled boulders.
But the surprise of the day was being greeted at this funky out-of-the-way honky tonk by a friend from Oregon. What are the odds that Stephanie, a Montessori teacher from Corvallis, would choose this place to celebrate her anniversary by dancing to acoustic blues?
The Starbucks house music has gone on to Neko Case, and now Sam Cooke croons "Darlin' you-oo-oo-oo send me..." The young father plays with his daughters toes. The old guy has claimed an additional table. I can see the mall behind him and above that the sun glinting off snow on San Gorgonio. I sip my latte and think about the unexpected connectedness of things -- of this temporary community of Starbucks customers, and of my permanent community of life friends, sneaking up on me at honky tonks at the edge of the Mojave Desert.