When the co-owner of a competing coffee shop was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Pixie Adams closed her shop for a day and ran her competitor’s, raising thousands of dollars to help with his medical expenses and giving his wife a chance to spend time with her dying husband.
Adams owns Moonlight Coffeehouse in Oak Grove, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. Dave and Tina McAdams own the Local Coffee Company, another drive-through shop about a mile away. Adams opened her shop in 2017, just two weeks after undergoing breast-cancer surgery. The McAdamses launched their business a year ago; Dave now “has inoperable cancer in his lymph nodes,” reported CNN, “and doctors say he has only a few weeks left.”
Adams and her friendly rivals know each other well. The McAdamses live next door to Moonlight Coffeehouse and have become good friends with Adams. “Dave even came here and got coffee the day he got his chemo cord put in,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle.
When Dave was informed that his illness was terminal, “I knew that I had to do something to help them keep their business afloat so that Tina could be with Dave,” Adams told CNN. “So, I decided to take over their shop and throw all of the support I could through my business and my community their way.”
Last Wednesday, Adams closed Moonlight Coffeehouse for the day and went to work at the Local Coffee Company. She advertised her move on social media as the “Moonlight Takeover Fundraiser.”
“If you don’t know, Dave McAdams has spent years working to support the local Oak Grove and Milwaukie communities through volunteer work, non-profit work, sports coaching and sadly, is now in hospice care as he bravely faces a terminal cancer diagnosis,” she wrote. “And that means their family needs OUR help!”
Among other things, Dave has been a youth pastor, a baseball coach, and a Rotarian. He’s also a member of the Portland Ghostbusters group and is so dedicated to it that he drives a car that looks like the Ghostbusters’ Ecto-1. In addition, he and his wife “run a non-profit which collects hygiene supplies and helps poor people do laundry,” according to CNN.
In her social-media announcement, Adams stated that every dollar earned on Wednesday, including tips and donations, would go directly to the McAdamses.
Between Adams’ goodwill gesture and Dave and Tina’s connections with the community, people turned out in force for the Moonlight Takeover Fundraiser. “It was a record day for the drive-up coffee stand, with 142 sales to coffee lovers who waited in longer than normal lines for their coffees, lattes and cappuccinos,” wrote CNN. Adams told Yahoo Lifestyle it was “absolutely incredible.” The event raised nearly $4,000, and the money keeps coming in.
“People have been calling to donate from all over the country,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle. Adams said she plans to continue raising money for her next-door neighbors at her own shop.
“I am so grateful to my community for their never-ending love and support,” Adams told Fox News. “They’ve allowed me to make Moonlight the heart of my community with kindness like this and it’s something special!”
The community, too, is doing its part beyond the one-day fundraiser. A friend created a GoFundMe page to help pay Dave’s medical bills; it has raised over $17,000. Last month, a Portland coffee roaster donated 100 pounds of a special Dave’s Loved Deeply Brew to the Local Coffee Company, which got to keep all the proceeds from the brew’s sales. The blend was named after one of Dave’s favorite phrases, which he uses to sign off videos he makes: “You are deeply loved.”
“He just sees people for who they are,” Tina told CNN. “He makes people feel like they’re the most important person to him.”
Now, thanks to Adams — whose friends created the hashtag #BeLikePixie to motivate more people to do good things in their communities — and many others whose lives he has touched over the years, Dave gets to spend his last days on Earth learning how deeply loved he is.
Image: amenic181 via iStock / Getty Images Plus
