puddle

I took my morning break at a coffee shop. It took a while. I stood there, leaning against the counter, waiting, thinking, happy for the break.

Two middle-aged men in work clothes came in and ordered their coffee.

"You are so patient," one of them said to me, just before I finally got my coffee.

I smiled, but inside I was thinking, "This five minute wait for delicious hand-pulled espresso is nothing. In some places, you can wait an hour for a thermos of hot water and a tin of instant coffee. Ya'll haven't even seen patience."

I took my coffee outside, into the sunshine, and pulled a chair out near the road by the bike rack. I took out my journal and a pen.

A couple came out to unlock their bikes.

"That's so cool!" the guy said. I looked around.

This is the sort of coffee shop full of hipsters in skinny jeans and women in dreads holding babies. I am near the bottom of the list of cool people who frequent that coffee shop. I'm the boring one. He could not be talking to me.

But he was. "No one does that anymore! Everyone has switched to the internet."

"That's not the same at all," I said.

"Oh, I know. I used to fill notebooks like that all the time."

"The internet doesn't feel the same," I said. "It doesn't even smell the same." I gestured with my hand, as the guy said, "I have my old journals somewhere. I should go dig out one that is half-finished and start writing in them again."

I spoke, I gestured, and the journal went flying. It bounced off the curb, eerily reminiscently of the way Wallace bounced into that pit latrine in South Sudan, and it landed in the puddle on the side of the road.

"Except that things like that happen," I said. I got up and fished it out of the puddle, laughing at myself. "Oh, well. It adds character."

"Don't forget to burn the edges, now," the girl said, "to complete the look."

It recovered remarkably well, though. You'd never know that it had been in a puddle unless, you know, you knew.