Each of Us

Awake in bed for a while, I considered the day’s agenda. I thought of my coffee shop routine and the other regulars like me the baristas encounter. I hear banter similar to mine with the baristas going on. They have a patter with everyone. I know the regulars’ faces and routines, and some of their surface stories. People who live in vans and come in to buy food and coffee and use the coffee shop’s free computer and Internet. Others with little resources doing the same but reading paperback books. Walkers who use the coffee shop as a rest and turn-around point.

Writers, of course, on computers or with books and notebooks. Students, of course, on computers or with books and notebooks. City council members. Southern Oregon University professors. High school teachers. Old liberals and old conservatives. Conversations, observations and declarations bounce around.

Police officers come by, and firefighters. Professors meet and discuss syllabi and surveys. The French teacher conducts her lessons, the Spanish teacher gives her instructions, the counselor consoles the suicide survivor, the financial adviser discusses bankruptcies with clients, the wedding planner shows people binders, crying people confess their worries and despair, the Christians discuss the Bible and the world, and boyfriends and girlfriends and young couples do what has always been done while old friends and couples visit with memories of one another.

That’s perhaps a third of what I witness happening here, in one coffee shop, in one neighborhood during a typical week. Zoom out with your lens and pick up the neighborhoods and other coffee shops. Expand your field of sight to the whole town, and consider the same scenes in other towns, cities, states and nations.

Look at the pubs and restaurants and include their routines. Widen the angle to consider the Internet, blogs and forums, and how each of us is different together and yet the same, how we’re individuals but also a breathing, thinking organism spreading around the world, burrowing into the Earth and reaching out into space.

Time for some coffee so I can start thinking straight.