Love at First Sight

Nothing happened that night. We stayed up almost the entire talking about our shared love of The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd. We shared our travel stories and childhood memories. We shared dreams for our future and what we wanted to accomplish in life. We simply shared. It was a beautiful, rated PG conversation. We just so happened to fall in love.

As I left Jessica’s house, that morning, I called my mother.

“I met the girl I’m going to marry,” I told her. “I want to spend the rest of my life with this girl.”

Jessica and I came from two drastically different upbringings. She was raised out of the American fairy tale only few in this country can speak about from experience. Her Mother and Father were high school sweethearts, and both were working-class heroes, of sorts. Her dad was a UPS driver and her mom worked in the local school district. They were christian, and predominant republicans. Jessica’s extended family was a vast expanse of aunts and uncles, majority christian republicans. Her grandfather fought in all of the wars he was eligible for during his lifetime, and her grandmother raised their very large family, while he did so. Most of the family, with the exception of three of the aunts and uncles, live just outside of Flint, Michigan.

My parents were both divorced once before starting a family, and divorced again when I was in high school after an infidelity and a cancer diagnosis. I was raised Jewish, and bar mitzvahed on September 9th, 2001. My dad was an attorney, and my mom worked in the human resources department of the school district that she was educated under. As kids, we got everything we asked for. We were spoiled, rotten and we knew it. I grew up in the upper-middle class community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. As I grew older, I found my community to be filled with glass houses that would shatter at the hands of a mere pebble. In my final days of high school, I found that pebble to be thrown at my household, which shattered with tremendous force as my mother confessed her infidelity to my father. Upon beginning college at Western Michigan University, I left behind a pile of rubble, my father, and two younger siblings in 2006.

I met Jess at that party in 2010. I still had about two years of school to finish, as she had just graduated from Central Michigan University. The night we met was the beginning of her summer. She had just finished her student teaching in an elementary school on the outskirts of Kalamazoo.

We spent the summer together, taking trips to South Haven, Michigan where we spent time on the beaches of Lake Michigan. She took me to her parents home to attend her brothers high school graduation party, and to meet her family. I took her up north to meet my family and celebrate my grandfather's birthday as we always do with a floating trip down Gunn River.

Jess and I had fallen in love. We were inseparable, until the summer came to an end and Jess needed to find a job, and kick start her career. She had reached out with no response from the local Kalamazoo school districts. She got very little response from those districts that were closer to where she grew up in the Flint, MI area as well. We reached out to my mother, who mentioned that the middle school in her district needed a long term substitute teacher to fill in for a couple of months while a teacher took her maternity leave. Jess interviewed and was offered the position, which she accepted, and we soon began starting to pack up her belongings.

We’d soon discover that Jessica would be in a situation of glorified homelessness. She stayed with her parents in Flint, and would commute an hour to work twice a week, while living with my mother and my mother's boyfriend in Farmington Hills on the other weeknights. She’d travel to me, in Kalamazoo, on weekends. For the entirety of our first year together, we traveled and spent time apart, just so we could find the time to spend together.

After thirty weeks of driving all over the state of Michigan, Jess came back to Kalamazoo in the Summer of 2011. She lived with me and the two housemates I’d been living with for two months, until her and I found a one bedroom apartment on the North end of Kalamazoo. I worked an on-campus student landscaping job while she found gainful employment at a daycare facility, for the summer. Later that summer, Jess was offered a position with Kalamazoo Public Schools at the lowest functioning elementary school in the district. She accepted the position as I began my final year at Western Michigan University.

Jumping Ahead to My Graduation

After six years of studying, I would finally graduate. No one ever said you had to make it look pretty. Still residing at the one-bedroom apartment on Elm Street, I had recently quit as a drummer playing in a fairly serious band, to start seriously looking for career level employment.

On the Monday following my graduation, of which I earned a Journalism Degree, I opened my phone and tapped on the Facebook app icon to read Chicago Tribune Lays off 500 Staff, New York Times Scales Back 300 Employees, etc. I panicked and called Jess, but there wasn’t an answer, because she was teaching. I called my Dad, but nobody answered. I called my mom.

“Hi Honey,” said my mom. “How are you?”

“Well, I’ve been better,” I said in a panic as I began explaining my discovery regarding my current demand in regards to the job market.

“Well why don’t you just go apply at a coffee shop?” she asked. I brushed her off and continued freaking out over the fact that I more than likely just wasted about $40k in student loans and 6 years of classes I’ll never get back.

After a few days, her advice finally clicked with me and I rode my bike downtown to Water Street Coffee Joint, and filled out an application. After a few days, I was contacted for a job interview and a few days after that, I was called by Water Street Coffee Joints’ General Manager.

“We noticed that you applied for a barista position, and we filled all of the barista positions, but we think you’d be a great fit at our roasting facility,” she said. “Are you interested in working with our production team?”

“Of course,” I exclaimed as I accepted the position and was debriefed on the next steps I’d need to take. I made sure to make them aware that I had a family vacation to the Dominican Republic, and that I’d need to be gone for a week. They offered to start me with one shift before I left.

I remember the excitement that Jessica and I shared for my new role. Water Street Coffee Joint was an established and well respected local business. I knew very little about coffee, but I felt as though Jess and Water Street were my chance at taking a slice of the American Dream. Or my American Dream, any how.

On my first day, Water Street had shut-down production for the annual roaster cleaning, which meant they would completely disassemble, clean and reverse engineer a nearly two ton, $50,000, German-engineered coffee roasting machine. I made sure that I’d be appreciated by volunteering to crawl into the machine to clean out the hard to reach spaces, and come out covered in chaf, char and coffee oil, looking like a chimney sweep.

Jess and I left the country for a few days, and I returned back to Water Street to find some troublesome news. While I was away on vacation, they had fired their Roastmaster, the Head of Coffee Operations and replaced him with Seth, the production manager.

“We’re looking to move someone up to Production Roaster, would you be interested in learning to roast coffee?” Seth asked me.

Still, in no position to turn down a job offer, I gleefully accepted.

And again, Jessica’s and my life together would be forever changed.