Coffee Shop Conversations
Americans are known to talk to strangers. We are overbearing, we are verbose, we are often overly friendly to the point where our genuineness is put into question. As an introverted child growing up in the Midwest, nose buried in a book, I never thought I’d live up to this stereotype, this image of the Southern woman in a Hallmark store I had conjured up in my mind. But last week I talked to a Trader Joe’s cashier for over twenty minutes, so it’s time to address a truth about myself:
I love talking to strangers. It’s a newfound quality that my ten year-old self would never have expected, but there’s a thrill in asking a woman on the sidewalk for directions, engaging with a museum guide about the history of an art piece, trading travel stories with the old man at a dive bar. Perhaps it’s the newness of it all, or its inherent cinematic quality–the crosspoint where two stories entangle for the first and maybe the last time–but I love when someone entrusts me with a part of themselves, knowing full well they may never see me again.
I’m a barista at a local coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee where I talk to people all day. I could get a job at nearly any other restaurant for an extensively higher pay, but I choose to stay for the customers, for the interesting characters I’ll meet and the stories I’ll bring home with me. These strangers either reappear in my life enough to become friends or they stand in my memory like a lone reed blowing in the wind. Regardless of which direction it goes, the people I meet in cafes often teach me about myself, sometimes things I’d rather not know.
Part I: John & The Person I’m Scared Of
John is my favorite customer. Every weekday as it nears 11:00 a.m., I wait patiently for his black truck to pull into the parking lot so I can begin his order: a drip coffee from our largest mug, a splash of whole milk, and a yogurt parfait. He’ll walk through the doors like he owns the place, dressed in his embroidered button up and neon orange beanie. Contrary to most customers, when John asks me how I’m doing, I rarely default to “good.” I met him when I returned from my semester in Europe last spring, and we instantly connected over our mutual love for video production, tattoos, and travel. I talk about school and my relationships, and he shares about his new life as a father and the struggles it brings. He never sugarcoats the challenges of being a father, often coming in to complain about the shit he cleaned up last night or the screams that woke him. I recall one morning he was telling me about a particularly rough morning with his son.
“Don’t ever have kids,” he laughed.
“My last boyfriend actually broke up with me because I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids, so I suppose I don’t need the warning.” I smiled weakly. It was a decision I remain insecure about.
“Screw that guy,” he said. “I’m forty-three and only now had my first child. Calm the hell down–you’re twenty. Anyway–look at my basil plant!” And he proceeded to whip out his phone to show me the backyard garden he’s surely more proud of than his son. He strikes me as someone who is wise but aware of all he doesn’t know. He is “grown up” in every way but also doesn’t pretend to be.
★ ★ ★
I don’t know the kind of grown-up I want to be.
Earlier in the fall semester of my senior year of college, one of my creative writing classes was tasked with reading The Glass Essay by Anne Carson, a lyric essay where the speaker meditates on her ex-lover while visiting her mother in the Canadian moors. Carson repeatedly makes reference to her favorite author, Emily Brontë, in an obsessive, almost worshipful way.
“Who is your role model? Who is your Emily Brontë?” my professor asked as we pulled out our notebooks for the day’s writing prompt. I considered this for a long time, taking off and reapplying my pen’s cap anxiously. This was a hard question for me to answer; I loved my parents, I was inspired by my grandmother, but there was no shining individual to whom I looked for guidance.
My twenty-second year had been marked by indecision. For the first time ever, no one was telling me what to do, and there was no right answer. My last relationship ended because I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids; I don’t know which milk to buy at the grocery store, I don’t know if I should quit my job where I make twelve dollars an hour and am chronically overworked, and I’m even less sure how I’d make decisions for anyone else. So, when my favorite customer asked me if I could begin babysitting the kid he had spent the latter half of the year complaining about, naturally, I said yes.
★ ★ ★
I pulled up into John’s driveway promptly at 6:30 p.m. to a woman in an oversized tee and baggy sweatpants walking a toddler inside, shifting lazily from foot to foot as she dragged the young boy in from his playtime. I was expecting John to explode from behind the door with a jubilant welcoming, but instead I was greeted by the woman’s tired eyes, heavy and dark with pronounced bags settling beneath her pupils. She had pale skin, dark, wispy hair, and striking gray eyes. She welcomed me into her home with a wave of her hand.
“Hi, I’m John’s wife, Sara.” She smiled weakly. “Oh, we only ask that you take off your shoes before you enter the living room!” She said, eyeing my fraying, mud-stained Oxfords. I crept uncertainly into the kitchen where John stood barefoot on the white tile floor, his back turned to me.
“Hey, Elisabeth,” he grunted, not batting an eye as he hovered over the stove. Through the window, I eyed the basil plant in the backyard garden and smiled.
Their two-year old son, Luke, sat proudly amidst the kitchen floor in a heap of LEGOs, toying with a piece of blue Play-doh Sara had to snatch out of his mouth several times. I could tell the two were exhausted from a long day of work straight to a long evening of parenting a child, but their tiredness was so tangible that I couldn’t help from feeling like my presence was burdensome.
As we sat down to dinner, I tried my hardest to stay engaged and fill every last inch of silence.
“So, how long have you two been together?”
They both set down their forks and stared at each other from across the table, squinting. Sara buried her face in her hands and sighed, “Ten years, has it been?” with a tired laugh.
John snickered as he eyed his son sprawled out on the floor, Play-doh stretched across his hands. “Ten years of this craziness,” he breathed.
The couple smiled endearingly at one another, but my mind started racing. I had just witnessed a blip in time–two lovers who had let ten years fly by in an instant and were introducing their new babysitter to their home so, one radiant night, they might be able to have their first date night in months. Sara looked somewhere in between happy and disappointed sitting there in her sagging shirt and drooping eyes, like she had just arrived at that dinner table by a few rolls of chance. Do I really want this? I thought.
The rest of the night I was once again made painfully aware of my reservations with domestic life. Sara gave me a tour of the house and of Luke’s bedtime routine, starting with his bath, where I watched blankly as the naked child was loofah-ed in soap and water. Turn the faucet on. Wait till the water’s warm. Add soap. Throw some ducks in there, he likes that. Start to panic. Make sure his ass is clean. Question the validity of your future. Turn the faucet off. Do I care enough about this?
“Did you know,” John looked up at me with an enthusiastic smile, “that, statistically, kids develop a fear of water between the ages of one to two? You gotta get them well acclimated to the water from a young age.” Add a few more ducks. Dry him off. Stop thinking. Apply eczema lotion. Read a book from the shelf. Kiss freedom goodbye. Turn on the white noise machine. Wonder where the last ten years went.
I still talk to John at the cafe just like I used to: casually, lightheartedly, poking fun at each of our lives. I have never seen him quite so serious and exhausted as that night. But the love for your own child, he’d tell me from time to time, makes it all worth it.
And there was the little one! All alone in his adorned glory, sitting on the couch, his parents looking over at him like a legacy, like two years spent alleviating his fear of water and putting their blood sweat and tears into making sure he can distinguish a book from a CD. It all seems so futile. So beautiful and futile.
I don’t know the grown-up I want to be. But I know I don’t want to stand, ten years in the future, looking back and wondering where all the time went.
Part II: Pepe & The Person I Want To Be
December has everything in its favor: Christmas lights, Bing Crosby, trench coats, hot chocolate and time with loved ones. It has the potential to be the best month of the year, but for the same reasons, it holds the power to be the absolute worst. I knew before it started that last December would be a hard one. I had been dumped two months prior, my friends were out of town, New Year’s was approaching, and my school work had slowed to a halt, so I finally could ruminate on the emptiness in my stomach. The loss that I had postponed was knocking at my door. To top it all off, I would soon be a senior in college, and my career path was less certain now than it was three years before.
As a young girl, December was my favorite month. Each Black Friday I would scramble to our mailbox to usher in the season of joy with my own holy text–an American Girl catalog, filled with all the holiday deals that my parents could not afford. Each year I begged for Kit Kittredge, the aspiring writer who grew up amidst the Great Depression. She sailed down the streets of suburban Ohio on an orange crate scooter, dressed in a chicken feed sack dress with a newspaper clutched in her hand; she longed to be the next great reporter, and I longed to be just like her.
Since I can remember, writing has been at the forefront of my life. When I was in elementary school, more than anything I wanted to be an author. I sat at my desk (a TV tray) in my office (the basement of my childhood home) and conducted serious investigative journalism (wrote stories about a detective named Leslie who solved the mystery of the Haunted Stage, modeled after the ominous stage in my school’s gym). I wrote movie scripts that my stuffed animals starred in and plays that my family would reenact. Like a twenty-first century Kit Kittredge, I was bright and ambitious and yearned to see my name under a headline. One year my parents teamed up with my aunts and uncles and grandparents, and everyone chipped in to surprise me with my very own Kit doll. It was around that same time that I stopped writing stories. I knew I wanted to be like Kit, but I didn’t know how to be like myself.
★ ★ ★
That day in December I woke like a zombie, unsure of who I was or where I was headed. I knew I could go to church, walk to my car, grab a coffee and study, so that I did. After three coffee shops were either too busy or near closed, I exasperatedly arrived at my last resort–The Well near Lipscomb University–and decided I’d stay put no matter what. There were no free tables, so I asked a woman if I could join her, to which she agreed. Shortly after, an older gentleman with horned-rimmed glasses, a black sweater vest, and olive complexion joined our table. He quietly pulled out a canvas and a set of acrylic paints and began painting a scene of children ice skating, brimming with rich reds and greens, the white of the snow sparkling in the overhead light. I studied him for a moment, his brush lightly stroking the ice, and I couldn’t restrain my curiosity.
“That’s beautiful,” I admired him, wide-eyed. “Are you an artist?”
“Oh, hardly.” He smiled. “I work in finances, but I paint Christmas cards for my family every year.” I studied the children on the rink, smiles hidden under hats, feet lifted into the air joyously. I pressed on.
“Well, I curate art at Cafe Ma’kai on Wedgewood, and if you’re ever wanting a new home for your work, I’d be delighted to display some there.”
He thanked me kindly, sharing how he’d worked with the Nashville Metro Arts department for years and wanted to retain his creativity in the shape of annual Christmas canvases. We began talking about ourselves and our interest, how I had changed from a Songwriting major to an English double major after studying in Northern Ireland and how he came to Nashville after living in Spain for fourteen years.
“So Elisabeth, what would you like to do with your English degree?”
The dreaded question had come.
I’ve long identified myself as a jack-of-all-trades, kindly put that I have trouble sticking to just one path. In high school I was heavily involved in the music, arts, and athletics departments, so choosing my major was no easy decision. When I landed on Songwriting, I was certain that I wanted to be a touring artist and write songs for the rest of my life, but after returning from a semester abroad where I detached myself completely from music, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I could no longer call myself a songwriter, and I was far removed from my childhood dream of being an author. I could’ve come up with some well-articulated lie, but I chose honesty.
“I’m not sure, really,” I sighed. “I know I love stories. I want to write creatively, help others, and see as much of the world as I can. Those are the only qualifications.” I shrugged.
Pepe was quiet for a moment, his eyes glued onto the corner of a dress he was filling in with red paint.
“Do what you love to do and don’t worry too much. You’re smart, you’re good with people–I can tell. You’ll be fine.”
Tears began to well up in my eyes. Here I’d been, alone in a coffee shop on a lifeless day in December where I almost lacked the courage to get out of bed, thinking I was an unloveable failure, and a stranger recognized strengths in twenty minutes that I hadn’t been able to see in twenty years. He went on, now staring intently at me.
“Travel as much as you can while you’re young,” he advised. “You won’t want to regret not doing the things you love when you’re older.”
“Yeah…” I trailed off. I thought about all the fracture in my life right now: a lost best friend, a broken community, unsteady plans for the future. Leaving it all again seemed impossible. Pepe leaned in.
“Your heart is clearly in Europe,” he urged. “You need to make sure you go there to satisfy that desire.”
In the thirty minutes Pepe and I had spent together, he had discovered my essence, the light at the center of who I am. Talking to him was a reminder that–even when we feel most like a blank slate, like a list of things we haven’t done–our gifts are often obvious to everyone but ourselves.
The year I was gifted Kit I stopped writing stories. But I started reading more, I developed my own taste in music, I started writing songs only to come back to the place where I started. I still see myself as Kit, a young girl with a tight bob and a fiery passion for the power of words, unsure of where it will lead. Passions still have purpose when they lack direction, and sometimes it takes a stranger to show you who you are and who you want to be. I want to be more like Pepe.
★ ★ ★
It’s been a year and I haven’t seen Pepe since. I enjoy the not knowing, the staring out from my window and wondering where he might be and whose life he might change next. Oh, the romance of it all! That’s what being a writer is. It’s the same reason I love traveling and the same reason I’m afraid of settling down–I like dipping in and out of moments in life, riding a constant wave of momentum.
I’m more than a barista, but I’d say I do being a barista well. Even as I take orders and pull espresso, I’m writing–attending to these moments, collecting the details that make up a life, hoping that one day I’ll weave them into something new. Just another day at work.
