Ode to Village Grounds

As I sit down outside to write this, I wonder how many blog posts or even business reviews there are for a cafe that has closed. On Yelp it’s easy to imagine that people’s negative reviews could help to close a business. I’m guessing there are even more texts out there that pay homage to the corner shops, noodle houses, antique stores, book sellers, and myriad other businesses that worked their ways into the habits and paths and memories of the neighborhoods they inhabited. I think of the community organizations, even Facebook groups, that have popped up for Oakland’s famous Parkway Theater, which reemerged from decades past in the 1990s, developed a faithful following of couch-sitting, pizza-munching movie viewers both far and near, and only recently closed down again. Will it return?

It’s a calm night outside Village Grounds, a cafe opened by Sarah and her husband something like four years ago. I’m not the one who’s best situated to write its history; I recognized some of the regulars there, mostly firmly planted behind their laptops and plugged in to the many 6-plug heavy duty outlets, surfing the internet on the free wi-fi—a definite laptop-friendly cafe, and favorite haunt of graduate students with its big tables, good light, open space, tasty eats, and good coffee drinks.

But I’m not the best suited to write a review for this cafe either, sitting then metaphorically as I do now in person, outside the cafe. I’m not sure what it was—the selection of music which (in my early memories at least) always seemed to be skipping over scratches on a CD; the (too) bright sunshine that prompted Sarah to install shades that had to be pulled down just after noon along the cafe’s westward-facing front; or maybe the intensity of the stares of the people in front of their computers, making it seem hard to do what I remember Sarah had wanted to see happen in the cafe from the get-go: talk to others. In fact, now that I think of it, that’s what she had said she imagined with the name “Village Grounds”: that her vision of the place was as a site of community, of conversation, of people getting to know her. To my mind, she always embodied this in her knitting of scarves, beanies, shawls, little booties and other reminders of the people in our lives who haven’t yet advanced to, or have advanced beyond, socializing in cafes and drinking coffee.

So, as I sit outside in the dusk of Berkeley on this warm night in March, looking into the dark windows and table-less interior of the closed cafe, it’s not without some sense of guilt that I recall that this wasn’t one of my favorite places to sit. As if…

As if I am complicit in the closing of this popular spot, where Sarah had gone so far as to allow me to sell some of my dad’s photo cards from a little basket that had sat right there on the countertop for over a month. Where I had sat and written a few papers and probably even more blog posts. Where I had sat and worked and talked and laughed and eaten and deepened my friendships with Thao, Mark, Rie, Diana, others…

The sky is getting darker. There are no signs indicating the cafe has closed, but the emergency light shining off the empty concrete floor seems to tell the whole story. Time to go home.

Thank you, Village Grounds. I wish the best to Sarah and her family and the folks who worked at Village Grounds, and hope there are others of ‘us’ out there who remember too.