Nostos : Fri Sep 13 2024

No Off Season & Literal Poop

Dear Friends,

There is no “off season” for Odyssey. Yes, the tourists are gone — though they’ll return this weekend for Bruce Springsteen at Asbury Park’s Sea Hear Now Festival — but an Odyssean still unlocks Odyssey at 6:30AM every day, dials in the espresso, and opens the door for you at 7AM.

Every. Single. Day. of the Year.

Honestly, it was a good thing that Odyssey wasn’t so busy earlier this week because the summer crowds would have made it more difficult for me to clean the bathroom after — stay with me — the toilet and its liquid and solid contents were flooding the WC’s floor.

“Dad, hey dad, are you there? What do I do when there’s pee flowing out from under the bathroom door and there’s even literal poop on the floor?”

You can picture Isaac (remember, he’s my 16 year old and he’s now an Odyssean) standing in Odyssey’s bathroom, its door closed, phone to his ear, his new black Converse sneakers soaked in you-know-what, and sure thing — literal poop at his feet — and he’s eager to help but genuinely confused.

“Welcome to entrepreneurship, love” are my first words, and he knows I’m not being cynical. I gave him a simple instruction: “Put up an Out of Order sign, and I’ll be right there.”

I didn’t want to be right there. I had just settled into Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics on my porch and didn’t feel like being the heroic entrepreneurial servant.

But, dear friends, this is precisely what we mean when we say there is no “off season” at Odyssey. It means there simply is no time when we decide not to serve our people.

There are high, sublime benefits to being the town’s coffeehouse owners — friendship, community, synergy, ideas — and this is because we are ensouled bodies, capable of seeking the highest things, but we are also embodied souls whose bowels fail, and that might seem like a low thing, but we clean that up, too.

In my twenties I wanted to be a pastor. In my thirties and forties I got to be a professor. As a coffeehouse owner I get to be both.

Aristotle’s lessons jumped out of the book and into the bathroom, so I shuffled off the porch, darted over to Odyssey, and immediately relieved Isaac of poop duty. Stop judging me: I didn’t relieve him of that dirty task as a way of protecting him from hard work. Trust me, the Lipp boys have their tasks, and they pay for their pastries just like everyone else (even if it’s bartered for work at a discount).

I relieved him of that task because it wasn’t his. It was mine. Because if I’m going to be a pastor, it means I am going to be a servant; if I’m going to be a professor, it means I am going to be a student; and if I’m going to be a coffeehouse owner, it means I am going to be a poopy-toilet cleaner.

I know who clogged the toilet — I saw the soiled, frantically torn adult diaper in the trash can as I emptied it, and I know whose it is — and that’s why we exist. We exist to serve that man in that moment. We’ll serve you in your moment too.

Will you do the same for us?

In Ocean Grove we do these things for each other every day. The tourists come for the beach and the boardwalk and the ice cream, but those of us who live here came for the refuge. We came because it was a different kind of place — a place away from the noise and away from the news and away from the nonsense.

A strange, upside down place where the owners are the givers, the poor are just as seen, and the tall men in ties clean the floors on their knees.

There is no “off season” in Ocean Grove. Because there is no “off season” in a year-round refuge community of humble servants serving the high, and the low, and all the beauty in between.

To that end we work,

Joey