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“It’s almost five o’clock, and Darlene and I just realized we haven’t even eaten today. It’s been such a wonderful day, such a busy day, but we’ve just been constantly in motion that we didn’t even stop to eat.”

The person you just heard was Shanelle County, co-founder of Standard Pour, a new coffee shop in Valley Stream, Long Island. Shanelle reached out to me just a few weeks before the soft opening of her business, and I asked her to capture some snippets from those early days of its existence—the moments of excitement, struggle, and gratitude as they happened in real time.

The story of how Shanelle’s business came to be spans just a few weeks in the summer of 2020, starting from the very first time her cousin and business partner Darlene posed the idea to the day Standard Pour opened its doors. Throughout this experience, Shanelle has contended with all types of new feelings, many of which we document in this episode.

“It’s been about a week since the grand opening. And I think things finally feel like normal. Yes, it’s like we finally could think about the business and how it runs day-to-day.

In our first month so much has happened, and it was like the first hurdle was getting to the soft opening and then from the soft opening to the grand opening and all the things we wanted between the two end points. It’s actually kind of funny to see, to even think about how much we’ve had to take our vision and stick with the vision, but pivot during the process. It’s definitely not easy, but it’s been fun.”

I’m always interested in the moments we remember and the ones we forget, and the unreliability of memory. I wanted this episode to be about Shanelle, and also to paint a portrait of a distinct chapter in her life. When I mentioned this idea to Shanelle, she was gracious enough with her time to capture fleeting impressions and experiences—some from her, and some from customers—during the grand opening.

The result is both a traditional interview—we recorded this conversation just as Shanelle was closing up shop one day in December 2020, and you might catch the hum of refrigerators behind her—and also features clips from both Shanelle and customers of the shop scattered throughout.

I hope you enjoy this one-of-a-kind episode. Think of it as an interview with an incredible new business owner, but also as a meditation on memory. Here’s Shanelle.