Sunday afternoon

This is what people pass along for humor, sometimes, at the coffee shop. Emily remembers how her dad mimicked Mr. T and said “This contact is you, and this eye is me. I have my eye on you.” You should pity the fool that can’t at least smirk at that one, but this ain’t the A-team.

I think that we watch each other from time to time because we hope to see that someone cares. I do. Not forever. Not for dinner and a movie. Not even to put you on my Christmas card list. But in so many ways, some folks at Aimee’s will catch each other’s eye for a moment and  quickly and, maybe sometimes a little awkwardly, look away. I’m talking about coffee shop love, not a heavy metal concert or moonlit strolls in the park. I hardly know what I’m talking about.

But for the brief intersection of our lives, I am glad that me and whoever else can care a little about each other. We are alive for a little slice of time in the same place. The Venn diagram of our friendship would be a little bay-leafed slice where my cantaloupe-sized life and your purple plum shape come into momentary conjunction at Aimee’s.  Just a little sweet and savory, crazy little bite of love.

It’s not really like geometry or a chocolate chip cookie either.

It’s like when I sit at the counter at Aimee’s, sipping slowly on a currant iced tea, and Emily reaches down right in front of me and scoops some ice into a glass. And Matt reaches over and grasps the black pom pom and snatches the orange and olive striped hat off from her head. He gleefully announces the hat trick – the third time that afternoon. Emily with a half-smile on her face – hard to tell whether it’s going up or coming down - combs her matted blond curls on her exposed hat head with her fingers.

The hat now on Matt’s head fits him well and it does looks pretty good, but when he returns it, I think that Emily looks better underneath it than he does. And not just because Matt wears glasses or that I was looking at him from the side. I have my biases.

I am not surprised that I enjoy playing with people of all ages – and sometimes just sitting back and watching other people play. Actually, I’m sometimes disappointed that people my own age seem to have left behind some of the varied ways that people play.

Like this way.

It had snowed a little and late, earlier that morning, Sam and Zack had stopped by our house. Dawn opened the door at their knock on our front door, and, hearing their voices, I had left my keyboard and had come around and stepped out onto the porch with them where they were holding their snow boards. They wanted to know if I had made the big igloo at the tennis courts at Central Middle School. I told them I hadn’t, but I had seen the people that were starting to make a pile of snow yesterday as I was walking by.

I had stepped back inside for my coat and the boys and I had headed down the street. I grabbed my own broken plastic sled from the garage while they waited for me on the sidewalk. I told them as we walked together that I had broken the front of it off by hitting the curb on my last run the last time I had been out sledding over on the KU hill. My sled would still work backwards.

The shallow snow was already melting on the short hill at Central, but we went down several times, trading sleds. I didn’t try their short snow boards standing up. They didn’t stay upright that well themselves. Did I say that they are about ten?

We had a snowball fight around the igloo on the tennis courts. I popped Zack in the head – he had a hood on – a couple of times. Or maybe it was Sam. They are twins, after all.

I will be fifty-nine this month. But why wouldn’t I want to spend a little time sledding and throwing snowballs? And they are terrible at tennis, but they always win the occasional weekend games we play. Sam and Zack rules. Old guys play for fun.

So afterwards, I did the grown up thing of replacing the fill valve on the toilet. I had a little lunch and a little nap. And then I headed down the street to Aimee’s.

The baristas and a handful of hangers-on were somewhere in that intersection between kids and grownups that Sunday afternoon. Sam and Zack might say that they are all old. I know how much younger they are than me. After the lunch rush, they were all at least a little unruly. These people are not done with playing. The language and some of the games are a little older, I suppose. John was fooling around with his coat on backwards, his hood over his face. Boys and girls - and boys and boys - and girls and girls – their age was not that important as they teased each other. They mocked each other. They set each other up and they knocked each other down. Laughing.

Kyra had jammed her foot against the door when I walked up to it so that I couldn’t push my way into the coffee shop. She held me out for several seconds, but I am twice her weight. And it wasn’t snow balls she tossed toward the ceiling later, catching them carefully in one hand on the way down. Matt dared her to prove that she had indeed touched an egg to the acoustical tile ceiling by doing it again. I heard that one crack – but not break – before she caught it and finished breaking it into the skillet. The look on her face for a moment was half her age. I’m guessing that the look on my face wasn’t much older than hers at that moment either.

I gave Mary a bit of a hard time like her older brother might. I tossed some dumb remarks over the counter to grins and scoffs. A song played on the Pandora that someone said had been played at their graduation. I announced that at my high school graduation somebody managed to get ‘Schools out forever,’ by Alice Cooper on the loudspeaker. That was 1974. Nobody said ‘Alice, who?’ or made fun of me for that. They’ve all listened to the music their parents have played. But on other points they kidded me almost as if I were their age. Part of the reason I come to Aimee’s is to be kidded. And if you think I’m playing with that word, you’re probably right.

What play is all about is forgetting about the seriousness of life – the consequences for our actions, the finitude. I know well enough how many times I’ve ridden this planet around the sun. And I now get queasy hardly even getting going, swinging on the swings in South Park. But why would I want to act like I’m somewhere close to three-quarters of the way to the end of the roller coaster ride all of the time? Well not on this Sunday afternoon, anyway.

Maybe it’s because I am getting old that I get a little tired of the banter after a while. It is fun, but sometimes I want to lean back into thy thoughts. I want to know what it all means. Why are we loud and quiet? Why do we look and laugh? Why do we show that we care by popping each other in the head?

Aimee’s closes at three now on Sunday afternoons. Almost nobody was spending money in the coffee shop in those last two hours before five. And baristas need to get paid for working. Getting paid was the game as well when I was in my twenties.

No pity, please, but I got up and walked through the snow to get to work at the hospital. When it snowed. It was never that deep. The breakfast shift started at five am. I can’t remember how the work went very clearly, anymore. I had my place in the line setting up the trays for the patients in the hospital and the adjoining nursing home. I thought the cooks and the assistants were pretty old, but they mostly had to have been considerably younger than I am now. There was banter.

Then afterwards, I was slopping the dishes and sending them through the dishwasher in one corner of the kitchen, stacking and putting things where they belonged when they were clean. At some point, I would join this other guy about my age at the deep sink in the other corner to wash up the pots and pans. We took our time, talking about nothing I can remember. But we took our sweet time. The cooks would call over from where they were breathing easier, reminding us that lunch needed to be served soon.

There was mopping, with the nearly identical same big stringy mop like the one I watched Emily slinging as I sat at the counter at Aimee’s. She had come over to swap out her device for the one playing Pandora in the speakers. She wanted her song.

It was ‘Sweet Dreams’ by the Eurythmics. Maybe you know the song. Who am I to disagree? Everybody’s looking for something.

I had my turn with the mop a long time ago. Now it was her dance. Emily left her little tennis shoe squiggles on the slick wet tile as she twisted underneath that black pom pom. And she swished them right back out with the gray mop head. I watched as she backed her way to the front and around the corner.

Then, eventually, everyone else - except Emily, Mary and me - had left.

The glamor of the barista’s job is not in the rolling up of the heavy rubber mats or sweeping a days droppings of crumbs and who know what all with a bristly boom into a dust pan. Or taking out the stuffed white plastic bags with the garbage and the recycling to the back. And it’s work making coffee drinks and serving up biscuits and gravy or French toast. People gotta eat something.

I walked to the river after Emily locked the front door behind me. I didn’t ask, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that she and Mary had some school work piled up somewhere.

I get various twinges when I’m sitting and sipping at the counter watching other people work. I don’t want to be twenty again. But I like to play. Let’s face it: sometimes a job of work is just a job. But there are satisfactions. And people gotta pay the rent.

But there’s a sweet piper, too. Everybody’s looking for something and not all of everything is dull and dreary.

I won’t figure everything out before I am finally hauled off my pony. The old Merry-go-round keeps on spinning and the music keeps on playing.

And I’ll play with anyone at any age who wants to have a little fun, once in a while. But to ride some rides, you gotta be this high. And I pity the fool who doesn’t ride once in a while.

And I’ve been that fool at times in my life. It wasn’t all my fault. I was sick. But this is what Wendell Berry says and what I believe, you are healthy when you are aware of your surroundings and other people. I hang out in coffee shops for my health, sometimes. People gotta play.