A Moment: (and stuff I don't normally talk about)

There are two people sitting across the coffee shop from me. It is the same shop, but I can see them through two sets of windows. (I am totally creepering, but can I help myself?) I think they are either both deaf, or one is deaf, because they are talking in sign. They are sitting about five feet apart, expressing their words through their hands, mouthing just about everything.

She flips her straightened hair behind her shoulder, and he sips coffee, and their wry smiles never leave.

It’s nostalgic.



It wasn’t too long ago when I sat with one guy at a coffee shop. I was young (or felt quite young), a junior in college—which is really, really young—and I’ll never forget the feeling. It was some bohemian coffee shop on campus, and he had mentioned earlier in a poetry course we were both taking that there was to be a poetry reading that night in the Bean.

“You wanna go?” he asked.

“Mmmm.” I was always incredibly indecisive. “Yes.”

Later that evening he scouted me out in the library. I had my face buried in some British Lit book, a book from a course he was taking as well. (We had three classes together that semester.) He didn’t say anything right away, but stood there for a brief moment, I think, waiting to see if I would notice him. I pretended not to.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Would you like to go?”

“Yeah.”

We sat in the Bean for what seemed like an eternity waiting for this poetry reading to begin, and in the meantime, I looked around at the people there. My poetry professor sat at a couch in the middle of the coffee shop as he was expecting some of his students to show. He did a double take as we sat down. Apparently it is difficult to realize connections when connections happen right in front of your eyes. But in a small Dutch town...

A few people who knew this guy and a few people who knew me looked at us from time to time, ready and waiting to be the first to claim they knew something had occurred between us. And although we both had a really good time, we let very little of that excitement show. I concealed my happiness with nervousness, because here’s what went down:

“I think you should read one of your poems.” He was placing his hand alternately on the couch and on his knee, and I was looking at that.

“I don’t think so. The poems I own are for classmate ears only.”

“But you’re not too shy to read them to us.”

“Right.” It wasn’t true. I had spent days—weeks—preparing for the poems I read in class, and I read them over and over until even my roommates had them memorized.

“So?”

“No.”

Just then we saw our semi-shy, semi-reserved professor step up to the small wooden stage and slide onto a tall stool.

“This is a poem I wrote not too long ago.” The whole room of literary, earthy, dread-lock sporting people who typified the Bean listened carefully. Our professor had a way of reading and articulating himself in a way very few could. He conformed to his poem, to the moment that led it, looking up when needed. He had once recited a poem he had learned in a grad-level class—the inspiration for all of us to memorize and recite a poem—and it was totally out of character for him. He spoke quickly, impeccably matching the whole tone of the bluesy poem. It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t a performance. It was a moment.

And so there I sat, with this guy, realizing that I too, was in a moment.

Everyone clapped. A few more people performed, regulars to the Bean.
“Go,” the guy I was with whispered. Without thinking, I dug around in my backpack for a poem I had from class. My class binder was there, so I pulled one out, not really caring which one came.

I went up there during a long break between the go-getters who had already read and those who wanted to but didn’t—like me. And as awkward as the pause was, so was everything about the way my foot caught random chair legs and the ledge of the stage as I stepped up, and so was the way I caught a glimpse of him and then everyone else, me wondering at them who were probably wondering about me—a non-regular Bean goer.

“Um…My poem is called ‘Itinerary’.” I braced my arms against my torso so my paper wouldn’t shake, and just as our professor had done, I tried to create a moment, not a rehearsed speech. Really, there was nothing rehearsed about me up there on that stage reading a poem I hadn’t even proofread.

The poem was about my childhood, about the activity-by-activity moments that guided our Saturdays. Being the children we were, we never premeditated our activities. Our itineraries were guided largely by interest, but dugout mounds and little creeks and dirt piles. Moments.

Like this moment.

Like how this guy had come out of nowhere. Like how the Bean was suddenly my place, not some stereotyped coffee shop. Like the poem I held in my shaky hands. Like life should be.

A moment.

Or rather a series of moments, totally unplanned.



The coffee shop couple two windows away are getting up to leave now. She, with her gorgeous straightened hair, and he, with quite a charming smile, both rise in unison, his hand for a brief moment patting her shoulder.

A moment.