Coffee

Me, 1990. After four years of teaching English as a second language in China and Japan and one year of travel, I've landed in Seattle, far from my home in a Philadelphia suburb. I'm staying with an old college friend and his life partner (to this day, they are happily unmarried parents of two daughters), who went to the same college. My stay in their one bedroom apartment is far too long, but I'm unaware of that. (Years later, that fact will hit me hard and embarrass me. Social skills and awareness of them came to me late in life, and incompletely.)

I'm thirty-two years old and I haven't visited home or even spoken on the phone with my parents or my brothers for five years. Such calls cost a fortune then and letters sufficed.
I've decided to bicycle from Seattle to Minneapolis, then fly the rest of the way home. I've bought the bike, a tent, sleeping bag, and pannier bags for the ride and take a short ferry ride to Port Townsend to practice camping and do some rides to see how things work out. While there I meet others and talk. One man I met was on a fishing trip with friends. He told me he sold coffee from a cart in Seattle for a living. He charged a dollar a cup, a high price in 1990, and said he made over $75,000 a year doing it, working hard for five hours a day. This was years before Starbucks was known to anyone outside that region, even though it had been founded in 1971. There were fewer than fifty Starbucks stores at the time, and their emphasis was still on selling bags of roasted coffee to take home. The only reason they brewed coffee in the stores was to provide samples.
I had no intention of making a career out of teaching so I thought passingly of doing something like what that man was doing when I got back to Philadelphia. 

Looking back, I regret not doing so. True, I knew nothing about how to start a business, but that can be learned. I had enough money to live on for awhile and I could have gotten loans. As it was, I pursued another career which I failed at (journalism), lacked the self confidence to pursue a second career (which I'm too embarrassed to even name) and fell into a third out of need (a low-level retail position) that, even after doing it for a dozen years, I never earned close to half of what that street vendor in Seattle was earning in 1990, even not adjusting for inflation (his earnings would be about $145,000 today). 
Speaking of coffee, this clip will make you want some, even if you usually don't drink it: Coffee.