(Jan. 19, 2017) On an unseasonably warm Thursday last week, a small group of about a dozen old friends gathered at Crush N Crab in Berlin over coffee and breakfast.
They sat together in a booth with a handful of extra chairs pulled to the side of the table. The sun was still coming up and beaming brightly through the window, facing Route 113, and the weekend of snow had just melted, as one patron said, as if it had been painted over by a single brush stroke overnight.
The meeting was familiar to many of them, although this time was different. The venue, for one, had changed.
When Berlin Coffee House closed last month many of them suddenly had nowhere to go, including former owner Peggy Hagy.
“I miss it dearly – not the aggravation, but the people. But retirement is nice,” Hagy said. She said she has been working on finishing closing the store, and is devoting much more time to her artwork.
Mike Wiley is the ringleader of the group, which he affectionately dubbed “Refugees from Berlin Coffee House.”
“I individually talked to a couple of people and everybody said they missed getting together at Peggy’s in the morning,” he said. “I said, well let’s have a little reunion and I hit the Internet and made a couple of phone calls. We’ll see how it works here.”
Wiley joked that the group had been going through withdrawal.
“It’s great to see everyone again. It’s like a high school reunion almost. Maybe it will become a one-a-week thing.”
Berlin Town Councilman Thom Gulyas was among the devoted coffee house “refugees,” and he was only too happy to accept Wiley’s invitation for coffee, to talk about what was going on around town, and to catch up with his friends.
“We miss the shop a lot,” he said. “We wish Peggy hadn’t gone out [of business] – and she still won’t let us come to her house.”
Gulyas joked that the next meeting would be at Firehouse Coffee on Buttercup Court, at the Wiley residence. Wiley is a former firefighter.
“It really is good to see everybody again,” Gulyas said. “I missed them all.”