OLD ENOUGH

For the past 4 or 5 years I have been treated kindly and allowed to sit with a coffee group that has been meeting in the same coffee shop, 6 mornings a week, for the last 30 years. Only a few of the originals are left but you know how nature hates a vacuum. I don't know whose space I have taken but then nobody keeps score. I don’t go every day needless to say; once a week is par for me, twice does not raise any eyebrows. If everyone who fits the profile came on the same day we would spill outside on the sidewalk. But a typical morning would find 9-10 of us pooling sometime after 9, only to slip away a couple of hours later. Sometimes I get drawn into the conversation but more often I listen, sip down a couple of cups of decaf and watch people come and go. It’s way-cool watching young moms and dads wearing their infants in slings that fit on their chests. Then before you know it the kids are in strollers, then toddling along holding a hand. We watch the crumb snatchers grow up at coffee. One young mom has a little girl who started out in a sling about the time I first came to the group. That little girl now opens the door so her mom can push little brother’s stroller through. She is delightful; always smiles and blushes when we greet her. Her mom tells us about her adventures in drive-by sound-bites. I remember a couple of years ago before little brother came along, she came to coffee in her halloween, ballet tutu, dancing on her tippy-toes. Whatever our conversation may be about, it stops when kids come by. 

We are old enough. Maybe that says it all, we are old enough: old enough that we have all lost a dear someone to illness and disease, old enough that nobody takes health for granted. Nobody wants to dwell on mortality or health issues and we don't go there very often. I’m good at finding someplace else to be if the going goes dark. The kids and dogs give everything a lift regardless. Patrons sit at tables on the sidewalk in warm weather. Dogs get tied up outside regardless. Watching them, the great dane and the corgi on different leashes, trying to sniff out the other’s pedigree. I never, ever wanted to be a dog. I don’t care much for cats but of the two, I’d rather be a cat than the dog. Maybe it’s just I don’t like people that much and to be tail-wagging-devoted to a human would be like torture. I fit the stoic cat profile with litter box and purr if, only if I feel like it. We don’t see cats on a leash at coffee and I don’t have any idea what that would mean if one did show up. Still it’s interesting, watching the dogs and their people.

This is the first time in my life, since the military, that I’ve palled around with people my own age. I was a decade ahead of my peers in college. After that, teaching, I identified with students more than faculty or parents. Retired, I tend to connect with the generation behind me. My kids and their friends in their 40’s are just right. What’s good about my coffee group is they haven’t gone narrow, afraid of change. We’re liberal to moderate, unbelievers for the most part; nothing to argue about. Seems everybody I grew up with leans to the right now; my coffee group must be the exception. But that’s not what makes them so palatable. Whatever else may be going down, I never hear anybody rant or judge based on how things used to be. They are open to change and if i’s uncomfortable, then we are the part that has to change. In the movie, ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Tim Robbins tells Morgan Freeman, both in prison for murder, “It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.” I have fallen in with old hippies and come-lately egalitarians who are more about what’s coming up on the horizon than what's disappearing in the rear view mirror. We know if we live long enough it will get ugly. But we have today, with a little luck, tomorrow; and we know what to do with lemons.