Mornings in the coffee shop
Upon arrival, I noticed someone had occupied my favorite chair, one of two overstuffed armchairs opposite the fireplace with a small oak and iron table in-between. Dianne prepared my usual in a mug. I can't abide by getting a paper and plastic cup every morning just to throw it away. Now there were so many new faces who worked here. Joyce, a humble lady in her 40s with chestnut hair, had retired, and I missed seeing her smile and challenge me with the daily trivia question. And now Wendy would be leaving soon, as well. She'd told me she was going to a contact lens place just down the street. It's funny how attached we customers become to these busy ladies who come here so early in the morning to greet us with smiles, jokes, and hot coffee as we drag in off the street. Then before you know it, they are gone, to be replaced by a strange face, soon to become familiar in a week or two, and the name will be on your mind as you walk in.
She slides the mug towards me, and I thank her. Glancing down, I see it's filled to the rim. Joyce always left room for cream, and had the forethought to ask if I needed it, but that was her gift for customer service- something that can't really be taught. Some of us go to work, resigned to what we do to pay our bills and make our way, and others take to each day an earnest and fresh outlook, making the best of the situation at hand.
I flash back to a lunch visit two weeks ago, remembering when a new girl, maybe all of 20 years old, handed me a cup and the lid popped off, allowing the scalding black contents to pour forth all over my hand. Fortunately her manager brought me a rag with ice to prevent blistering. The girl had not even noticed, for she'd already gone to fix the next cup as I walked to restroom for cold water.
Now I'm very careful taking my mug to the condiment counter, because I know just how hot that coffee is. I add my usual two sugars and half-n-half, then head to the vacant chair by the fireplace. The interloper in my favorite chair glances up, and I recognize her from the previous week. She'd remarked how someone else had taken my spot that day, and it had never occurred to me that I was also observed as a regular here. Often I think myself an invisible observer, and at times when I realize I'm not, that's the most I ever come out of my terminal self-absorption.
She has those classic black-rimmed reading glasses, mostly oval and flat on top, that look like they are about to slide off a person's nose. She gives me a knowing grin, then turns back to her book. Her smile is that kind of secret smile, and I wonder what lies beneath. Does she smile like that because she knows I usually sit there, or because she is amused by the peculiar character I am here in this other world? My car, a modest Japanese manual sedan, has two bumper stickers that reveal just how liberal I am, and here in this exurb, I stick out like a clown at a funeral, for that is the general reaction received in this conservative outpost.
Over-analyzing her smile, as I so often do everything else, I reflect how this paranoid tendency isn't really new to me, remembering a time at the age of 11. My mother and stepfather had been married a year or so, and we'd moved into his stately antebellum home in a lesser metropolis than Atlanta in central Georgia. They were each so absorbed in each other's lives, that my brother and I were often unintentionally neglected, and we began to feel that we'd become more fixtures of the mansion than actual kids. We were to be seen and not heard; at parties, we were introduced and dismissed almost within the same breath.
Lying in bed at night, fantasies to explain this change in life began to surface, and one above them all crystallized as the most plausible for quite a while. Clearly, my mother and stepfather were KGB operatives, trained early in youth. Mom had married my father to gain access to the Pentagon, had children, probably by accident, then divorced as my father served no further use to her. She and my stepfather could then reunite, and eventually they would have to get rid of my brother and me. Then they could slip into Russian, discussing espionage plans as they wished, without fear of being discovered. And when they came creeping up the stairs at night to do us in, I would be ready with a fireplace poker...just in case.
Yes, looking back to that time and comparing notes on my internal dialog today, my paranoia had markedly become less comically dramatic, while still pervasive. Somewhere there is a six-legged psychobabble word for it, I'm sure, but really, how interesting is life without a little derangement?
Placing the mug on the little table and opening the book to the story for the day, I begin to read.
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