Do these words belong to anyone?

I don’t ordinarily sit around in coffee shops eavesdropping on conversations – this damning evidence notwithstanding. But I also don’t entirely close my ears. There should be no surprise, then, that for someone like me who likes the sounds of words and likes to play with them and even to try to make something out of them, that the words that I am about to present to you were for me like finding a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. With no one to claim the words, I noted them down. I mean, who could possibly imagine that I would leave alone words like the ones I picked that day in the coffee shop up to simply blow off into the storm drain, as it were.

Now I will not pretend that I remember most of what happened that afternoon some time ago at Aimee’s – a place so unremarkable and amazing that I recommend that you go there yourself. But you won’t quite see what I see. That’s how things work. But I will have try to make up as best I can some context so that you can perhaps hear those remarkable words.

It was afternoon. Aimee’s is not a very regimented coffee shop. The baristas occasionally excessively banter and even swear – mostly in fun. And if you walked into Aimee’s in the middle of one of those verbal melees, you might wonder just what kind of place that it is. Then after some pause, some young person would say to you, “May I take your order.” You can get drinks and sandwiches or breakfast anytime at Aimee’s, after all.

Again, I won’t pretend this is precisely how it happened, but Kyra, a regularly vocal young woman of maybe 21, and Chris, a young man who looks 30ish, but who just graduated from high school, were both making sandwiches. Chris, I think, had made one for himself before starting his shift, or maybe he had just finished his shift. He was sitting at a little table near the front door. There were a few people standing and chattering all around, some regulars and maybe another barista with not that much to do.

Kyra might have been behind the counter making a sandwich for a customer. The joking and teasing was crossing fast and furious. Chris and Kyra were well enough paired in their sparring. But a match they would never be, although she joked of this very possibility in speaking about how couples are. And then Kyra, speaking directly to Chris, uttered this, for me, a perfect sentence: “It’s like we’re finishing each other’s sandwiches.”

Now I hope I have offered you a small sense of just how wonderful words can be for me, because that was part of my objective. And maybe it was to you merely a scrap of paper blowing in the wind. Perhaps I could, with some effort, fill out these few moments in space and time, but I’m not sure I’d really want to try. A sketch might be enough, at least for me.

It’s true, of course, that most of the words we speak and write are not so memorable, and perhaps Kyra’s were not all that much. But much of our lives is spent living among them. And just as I might remark from time to time on a Great Blue Heron inhabiting the Kaw River, I remark on words. Maybe there’s not so much there there, except that for whatever reason, I, at least, still do hear every now and then something I want to keep. Sometimes words, in recollection and in repetition, take on some weight.

And now Mr. Faulkner’s words can be of service: “…how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it…”  I am not trying here to make a proof, but only to try to say something that I can’t entirely untangle in my mind. Words can be empty or full – and of many consequences or negligences in between. They can become their own kind of doing. The context and the observer matter, if anything does.

I spend an hour or so several times a week at Aimee’s. Sometimes the words of baristas and regulars are background noise like the sound of the espresso maker. My body is there, but my mind is looking for words I think I might have left along the river. And then, like the bell announcing the opening of the front door, a word from out of a voice I recognize comes in. I should be careful of my metaphors, I suppose, but it gets interesting to me when apparent opposites or incongruities come true at the same time, or maybe it’s simply that truth is just so much more complex than we know. Such silliness, most of that last sentence. But I feel the weight of things, sometimes. And words.

But let’s forget about truth for now. Definitions sometimes lead us astray. Since I am only writing words, note once again that I care more about poetry these days than truth. That afternoon at Aimee’s was at least five dollar’s worth. I stuck them in my pocket and walked on.