The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

My friend Nick and I strolled into the Looney Bean coffee shop in the tiny northern town of Crosby, Minnesota. We were grabbing some morning coffee and inquiring about the town's upcoming community festival that we thought was called "Crosby Days." It was taking place that weekend and it sounded like a fun thing to do with our families.

"Where do we go for the Crosby Days celebration?" Nick asked a Looney Bean employee.

"It's...called...Heritage Days," the teenage boy replied snidely.

Sea green walls, worn wood floors, granite table tops, and ruby red chairs surround the counter. It looks and feels like any other coffee house, but what happens behind the bar only happens at Kopplin’s Coffee.

I have learned many things after only two days in Rome.

I have learned, for instance, that I, who think of myself as a forthright women — pushy, even — have nothing on the people here who will grab a stranger’s arm and lead her into a restaurant or insist on turning heat on in her hotel room when it is already 80 degrees.

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

So it's not just your imagination, it actually is true. Those zero-calorie sodas people are popping left and right and up and down, ordering with their cheeseburgers and large fries and drinking instead of coffee in the morning or wine at night, actually lead to (or, as they say in medical-speak, "are linked to") metabolic syndrome, which is a fancy way of saying fat and all its attendant ills.