2 posts tagged “coffee shop”

Sitting next to me at the coffee shop today...a couple fifty-something women from the same firm and their visiting regional or something-of-the-like thirty-something male manager.  The women are making small talk.  Starts out with a little gossip, you know...

[So-and-so] has been trying to get pregnant for years so it was especially tragic, losing the baby...

I heard she didn't want prenatal care.

Well, Sharon's her best friend and she told me...

Sharon is her best friend?!!  I never knew that...

And so on.
But very soon it becomes:
I don't know what's wrong with my mother.  I don't know.  She's feeding the dog cat food and the cat dog food and taking their water inside when they're outside.  I swear I'm gonna come home one day and my pets will be dead.  I told her not to feed the animals.  I took all the knobs off the stove and put an 'out of order' sign on it.  Frankly, I'm just concerned that she might burn down the house.  We bought her a new coffee maker, but God forbid you bring anything new in the house, there's no way she can handle it.  And the microwave?  Forget it.  I mean, she's a sweet woman, you know.  But, well, she's 92.

Well, my mother's only 68 and she's so shot full of vicadin, morphine, anti-anxiety drugs and the whatnot, I swear, I can't even think about her driving.  It scares me.  So  I just don't think about it.

Well, I don't want to scare you, but my niece was on anti-depressants, nice Catholic girl, and ran a stop sign and killed a 54 year old mother of four.  You can bet my aunt and uncle are gonna lose everything because, you know, four kids, they're gonna sue.  It's sad because my niece is a wonderful woman and she's had her share, I mean, with her ex molesting the girls and her mother dying so young...and having that bi-polar diagnosis didn't help.

Everybody dies young in my family.  My father was 39 and my mother was 42, but that doesn't count because she drank herself to death.  And remember, my nephew--

I hear Hazelton's a good place.

I hear that too.

Isn't this when I, sitting a foot away, am entitled to turn to these people and say:
Your mother has Alzheimers.
Your mother is a drug addict.  Think about it.
Is killing someone as a nice Catholic girl more tragic than killing someone as a nice Jewish or Muslim girl?
Are the laws of attraction as such that if you talk so much about death and tragedy and its inevitability that you will bring on your own premature death?  Or do you think that the floorplans are all in place and there's not a thing that we can do?

I swear, I wanted to drop my head on the table and fall into a deep deep midday-in-window-sunlight sleep.

It is a beautiful day and I'm leaving to pick up my kids at school.  I will buy them ice cream today, try to make them laugh and agree to all their requests until the memory of the grown children in the lunch table next to me fades.  K     

Today at Busters coffee shop with my laptop I shoulda been working, but I couldn't because I had nothing to say and there were two women at the table next to me with the most extraordinary heads of hair...thick, unkempt rasta ringlets in 100 perfect gradations of blonde.  I kept wondering who I would be if I had hair like theirs.  There was also a man eating ice cream, circulating among the tables yelling, "Hello!"  then "What do you do?"  Something about his delivery and his insistence made him sound like a German tourist, yelling from a German-English book.  "Hello! What do you do?"  Everyone he asked answered him. 

     "I'm a student."

     "I make sandwiches."

     "I'm a teacher."

     To which he replied, "Where do you teach?"

     "Franklin High."

     "Is it a big school?"

     "Yes, one of the bigggest in Los Angeles."

     "How many floors?"

     "Uh, five."

     "How do you travel between floors?"

     "Stairs."

     "What about the handicapped students?"

     "Oh.  They have an elevator."

     "Is there a window in the elevator?"

     "Um, I think so."

     "Haven't you used the elevator?"

     "No.  You need a key to use it and I don't have the key."

     "Who gets keys?"

     "I guess people who need the elevator.  Um, people with bad knees, or doctors' notes or handicapped people."

     "Handicapped people have keys."

     The teacher gathered his things and headed out.  "You take care."

Tomorrow I'll try to finish my work at home.  K