What does it mean that the gradual arrival each morning of
the old men with their bags, to sit outside or sometimes to shuffle in for a cup
of coffee nursed long beyond its usual life, has become normal? Where do they
sleep at night, those aging bodies with the aches and pains that no one avoids?
I caught myself this morning, sitting in the table at the window, seeing out of
the corner of my eye one of the regulars pulling up his old duffel on wheels,
with a strap around to hold it in place. I realized that this seems ordinary now.
I looked around the people sitting inside at the tables:
gregarious, self-deprecating, bigoted gray-haired Richard, who likes to
assemble a knot of men around him to pass the time for a while before heading
out to do work that is much too physically demanding. With him often is a local
attorney about his age, and various others, most often men, befriended by Richard who will
talk to anyone whose glance passes his way. I’m a problem, because I’m much too
liberal and outspoken, but he tolerates me graciously. I take care to greet him
without stopping, because after a minute there is not much to be said between us.
There’s a man with a pony tail of an uncertain age-he used
to come in every day with a tidy but large backpack, but of late he comes without
luggage- he seems to have found a place to live. This I think is true not only
from the absence of the pack, but his demeanor has shifted from a pinch of obsequiousness
to a quietude and self-containment that speak of a sense of security in his
person.
The old man with white hair who is discomfited by any
interaction usually comes a little later. One time, a year or so ago, I forgot
my laptop in the coffee shop, and he took the trouble to rescue it for me. He
accepted my gratitude with embarrassment, and almost never acknowledges my
hello, but still I remember his kindness, and feel some sort of communal bond that he would
shudder at if he knew.
Lately, when I sit in my favored spot at the window, which
faces toward another table on the other side of the door, I look up and there
is a woman with a hard stare, seeming to feel some animosity toward me. At
first I stared back, to break her stare, but now I just leave her be. Whatever
the reason for her steely gaze, I doubt that I am any part of it.
I recognize in the manager the striving too hard to be
genial and likeable, because I felt it in myself at her age. It seems to take
women a while to give themselves permission to be who they are, by which time
their youth and the beauty of youth are somewhat diminished. This I know to be common, but no one can learn it until they can. What a waste of time.
We all show up each day to our own lives, striving for
something we rarely understand, and yet we continue day after day. We bring our
bags of remembered loss and diminution, the glow of happy memories, the ache in
our hearts for what we realize we will never have, and we wear about us our
armor of certainty, or lacking that, a shield to stop the world from seeing
inside. And we drink coffee together and alone.
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