My name is Elliot Gowen. I am the evening supervisor at Wilson Café in the Davis Library. I’ve been a resident of Middlebury for pretty much my entire life. I was born in Middlebury, I’ve lived here off and on for the last 38 years. I’ve been not too many other places. I’ve lived just outside Middlebury, so pretty much still Addison County. I don’t mind living here, it’s a nice place to live. It’s nice and quiet most of the time. I like traveling, I like to go to cities to see what they’re like but I definitely at this point in time, definitely not a place I would like to find myself living on a fulltime basis. I definitely like making coffee drinks and things like that. I’ve been doing that for, off and on for about 20 years now. I started, I started actually on campus. When the Grille first opened up and the Juice bar downstairs, that’s where I first started making coffee drinks and espresso drinks – things like that. So, I really liked just the crafting of them. I worked in a few other places over the years. I’ve managed a coffee shop in Brandon for about three years. It’s closed now but it was called the Ball and Chain Café. That was a really fun spot. It was really nice. That’s actually where I got a lot of creative control over things. The owners had a bookstore and they had, it was a split-level building and the top floor was like their used books and things like that and it was just a big open space and they really wanted to add something to it. I was doing some breakfast cooking in Brandon at the time in another restaurant and the owners were regulars that were coming in there and so, in conversing with them, they’d always come up to the window to thank us for breakfast, myself and my friend that owned the place. And um, they were talking about opening the café but they didn’t have anyone to run it, things like that, and my friend was just like oh, you know, he could do it for you. That was fun, that was quite a while ago, that was about fifteen years ago. Probably one of my more enjoyable things that I’ve done. Just being able to run a place. Just pretty much be able to do things how I want them to be done. How I think they should be. It’s a lot of fun to put yourself into a space and just see what can come of it. It was really just a very community oriented place. A lot of people would just stop in there on a day to day basis. I used to play scrabble with the mailman on his lunch break every day. He’d come in for a coffee and a game of scrabble. It was a really, it was probably by far, in terms of like a restaurant or service place, one of my favorite places to work, just because it was for the most part just my own space. That’s something I would really like to do eventually is have my own place. Just a coffee shop type thing. There’s starting to come more of a void in town for it, so it’s something I’m starting to look into, in the next five to ten years probably. It’s hard not to leave campus, as far as, what they provide for staff, for like benefits and things like that. It’s one of the better places to work around, as far as that goes. So, it makes it hard to start your own thing up when you have such a very comfortable and stable base of operations up here. But, it’s been a good place to learn a lot of things. To learn what I would like to have for a place and what I would not like to have. So, it’s just a good way to get my skills home for things and to try to figure out if it’s something that I really want to be doing for the rest of my life, that kind of a thing. It’s a lot of fun, I like interacting with people. I like working behind the counter and making drinks for people, just that personal touch that you add, a lot of the time, is what makes it enjoyable. And just the relationships you build with people while you’re working too. You know, just the last five, five and a half years since I’ve been at Wilson, I’ve met a lot of really great people. We’ve seen a lot of really, really fun students come in and out. It’s been extremely hard, you know, saying goodbye to people. Especially when somebody starts as a freshman, works their whole way up through - we’ve had that. The last two years we’ve had like, we’ve had over ten people graduate in the last two years from that. It’s been, that’s been really rough actually with some people. You really become friends with people, you develop relationships and then all of a sudden, it’s just like, okay, you know see you maybe every five to ten years for reunion or something like that. That’s, it’s one thing that - I really have liked working back on campus again. It’s just the interactions you can have with people. Most of them are good. There are always some negative ones and things like that. But you’re going to have that in any aspect of life – whatever you’re doing. But trying to overcome a lot of those things, it can be a fun challenge. It’s really difficult sometimes, just with a lot of the, just people aren’t always informed on things, so it’s really hard to – you know we can’t always give full explanations for things too – so it makes it difficult working. So, I try to work and not think about it too much on my free time. Most of my free time, I like to go for hikes. The trails around Middlebury are really nice and convenient too, which is really good. Within five minutes of wherever I am, I can be in the woods, and be on a trail somewhere, so I find that very, very nice and comforting. I like to spend a lot of time with my son when I can. He’ll be nine in two weeks. He lives down in South Carolina with his mom, unfortunately, but I see him as much as I can. We skype pretty often. Every day and every other day when we can. I go down to visit him, he comes up to visit me. He’s pretty much my focal point. That’s what I spend most of my time thinking about.