I wrote a letter to tell you....

Do you ever meet a person and wonder just what they are like beyond your brief moment of interaction? I find myself slipping in imagined truths between the cracks of the unknown--especially with strangers I repeatedly encounter. When I was a barista at Starbucks, I would often analyze the motives behind our "usual" customers. There was one slick-suited gentleman in particular that spoke only a handful of words to me each day who I found endlessly intriguing. Perhaps it was his uninterrupted routine that befuddled me--or maybe what that routine implied. I decided to write him a letter...to ask him the questions I may never find answers to.

January 27, 2007

To: Rick
From: Abbie

Today I drank peppermint tea with my neighbor while sitting at a cardboard box, the temporary remedy for a kitchen table until he can afford furniture. We sat there enjoying one another, legs criss-crossed on the calico carpet, bringing oversized white mugs close to our faces just to let the steam wander into our nostrils and across our cheeks. I watched my neighbor’s hands—defectless and tanned, curled gently around his mug like Akebia twining vines. His hands, almost too delicate for a man, spread extensively over the smooth porcelain, his pinky trailing and wrapping itself around the handle of the mug topped by the bud of his smallest fingernail. Ten perfected cuticles run into nails like little crescent moons, all the same width, length, and whiteness. It is the fastidiousness of his groomed hands that reminded me of you, Rick.

If it is possible, your hands are even more flawless. I know, because I have touched them myself. Even though just briefly, the graze of your skin against mine as you hand me money behind the counter at Starbucks each morning tells me so much about who you are, Rick—or who I think you might be. It is not just your hands that I have been reading for some time now, it is your face—particularly that smile. It is a smile that never seems to remove itself. A smile that is just as much a part of your attire as the slick suit, black as obsidian, that you wear each day with your tawdry ties set perfectly in the center of your chest--dissecting you into two indistinguishable symmetrical halves. A fulsome smile that rests somewhere between uncomfortably forced and sincere, as if you yourself haven’t decided which of the two you are. It is the predictability of this memorized grin that concerns me. That and the expedient tone of your voice every morning as you spout off your unchanging order, “five shots of espresso over ice with one Splenda packet, please,” a few moments of silence, then, “and a peppered bacon breakfast sandwich. Please.” Next, I call out that memorable total—$6.66—memorable ironically because it is the number of the devil, but more than that, because of its value. I have done the math. That’s nearly three thousand dollars a year devoted to high cholesterol, five shots of caffeinated liquid and aspartame that will keep that garish, wide smile wearable just long enough to make your next sale, win the favor of your next client, or slide into some irresistible promotion.

There is so much I want to ask you, Rick, as I reach into the register to give you your change—$3.34, everyday. You wear a ring; you must be married. You have children because I heard you mention their names. I wonder if they see you with the same frequency I do. I wonder if those five shots last long enough to supply you with ample energy to pick your children up, throw them playfully on your back, carry them to bed for a story or two after pushing them up the stairs by their feet, pretending they are wheelbarrows.

I need to apologize to you, Rick. I have tried to imagine you with your children, but it is harder than I perceived. There is something about the way your teeth gleam at the start of a new work day, coffee in hand, running off to your first love that more likely resides in a sturdy city building than at a kitchen table or on a living room floor. There is something so convincing about your collection of ties and the waxy gleam of your fresh hair cut that make it nearly impossible for me to imagine a child in your arms, capable of spoiling your beauty with the mustard on their hands or mud on their sneakers.

I want to wish you are an encouraging husband and a hero of a father, but my imagination doesn’t stem or stretch that wide. When I imagine you at home, I see a fabulously elegant residence with ornamental trimmings and a lawn so immaculate it makes the neighbors green with envy. I see your dignified home, one side removed so I can peer in like a dollhouse. There is so much space—a vast arrangement of rooms tiered in three stories. Inside the rooms I see you, your wife, your son and daughter. You are scattered like pins on a map, almost methodically, with three or four rooms separating one of you from the next. There is no converging in the middle, no use of the family room that lies directly in the center. No, the family room is far to distinguished, too opulent, too finely decorated for the messiness that comes with family— a game of Scrabble or a meaningful conversation. Each member of your family is instead occupying themselves alone, boxed away from the others. I see your wife downstairs in the home gym, reflective steel illuminating the room as she stands sideways in front of the mirror, red in the face from running on the treadmill, grabbing her sides with a repulsive expression. A floor above her and to the left is your son, diligently forming popsicle sticks into a box-like structure-- a science project for school. His eyebrows are pointed and arched with driven thought as he stacks one wooden stick on top of the next, terrified of failure (though he doesn’t recognize it). Alone in the far corner of the house is your daughter, purple flowers festooned on her head like a crown, jumping carelessly on her bed higher and higher until she nearly takes flight. She is the sole sign of unanxious security, too young to have yet faced any significant fears of her own. There is a spot on her bed just large enough for you to jump beside her, but you are miles away--on the far side of the house, deep in the den watching the Monday night game, tucked in a brownish leather chair like a hibernating papa bear hidden in the warmth of his dark cave.

As the vision of your house slips from my mind, a poem arises:

A sad story told by sad artifacts
We never thought might spell out our
own
A house divided as if split by
an axe
Two people sitting to their meals
alone

-- Artifacts, from The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Carmine
Starino, Ed.

As I reach to place three dollars and thirty-four cents into the palm of your too-smooth hand, I think one last time of your household divided into sections that may never intertwine, separated by a family room that is too holy, too foreign to meet in together. I glance quickly at the line of customers stacking behind you, many of them with ties and smiles like yours. I wonder where they will end up this evening. Finally my fingers slip off the top of your skin and I watch your hand dip into the crevasse of your black wallet. I find myself wishing those hands looked more like the skin of your wallet—leathery and worn from too many nights spent juggling your kids on your shoulders. Or from washing dishes in scalding water beside your wife as you share a close moment. Or from placing slivered kindling into the mouth of the fireplace, directly in the center of the family room, while your children surround you just to watch as embers spark and fly into clouds of billowing warm smoke.

Your final move each day before you leave the coffee shop is to drop a clean dollar bill into the tip jar by my side. Thank you, Rick, for this gesture of quiet kindness. But today, I ask you to keep your change. Take it home with you, tucked safely in your pocket, and bring it out only if it is needed to purchase ice cream to eat banana splits and sundaes around the table with your family.

Sincerely,
Your Barista

“Poetry often enters through the windows of irrelevance”

- M.C. Richards

Sometimes observing the smallest details helps me comprehend the greatest truths. That feeling of looking into microscope only to realize I am looking in a telescope all at the same time—understanding the greater picture through noticing the minute, the peculiar, and occasionally the surprising.

A few weeks ago I ruminated over what seemed to be a spiritual truth found in a brief observation on the routine drive to work along Barbur Boulevard.

As my car stalled at a stoplight, I couldn’t help but notice the green Taurus pulled over just to the right of me—the mass of car mostly covering a mother hunched over her son who was red in the face from repetitive vomiting. A moment of repulse was quickly intercepted by compassion. He couldn’t have been more than six years old. He was having one of those “crying so hard you can’t catch your breath” moments that seem so overwhelming when you are young. He had drool all over his face and was fully relying on the comfort of his mom’s hand gently rubbing his back in little circles without regard to the line of cars filled with staring onlookers. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I imagine she was consoling him with gentle words—stopping her life for a few minutes on the highway to stay close to her son. At the same time, she was probably cheering him on—coaching him until his painful little trial had passed.

After the light changed to green, I kept driving—hurting for that little boy, thinking about what a painful, exhausting experience vomiting can be. I can think of few worse feelings than the incessant stirring of something within that must come out. The more I thought about it, I myself began to feel nauseated and suddenly had one of those spiritual epiphanies that “enter through the windows of irrelevance”. God started speaking to me about my sin and its paralleled nauseating nature. God wasn’t blasting a profound word through a megaphone within inches of my ear, either. It more like he was that mother on the side of the road, rubbing circles on my back, coaching me to get rid of all that was stirring inside of me—convincing me that even though I didn’t feel like “throwing up” my sin, that I would feel much better, far more relieved, if I did. There is such a liberation that comes with the upheaval of sin that is otherwise holding us back from pursuing abundant life in Christ. I so often “let the moment pass”...waiting to see if my spiritual sickness will just go away…rather than confronting it. Who wants to commit to something that they know will be physically exerting? Yet, to leave it there means even greater discomfort.

Ephesians 5:8-14
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:

‘Wake up, O sleeper,

rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you’.”