Morning Thoughts in the Coffee Shop

A square of Edward Hopper light, a view of the parking lot, residue of last night’s dreams still clinging to the bottom of my cup: I was desperately trying to place a telephone call to my father. (Does that ever stop? He has been gone for thirty years.)

It still takes the wind out of me sometimes.

I must steel myself now for duties at hand, so I shift my thoughts to my life at home, conjuring soothing images of yellow sycamore leaves piling up in the creek bed, of oranges beaded with raindrops. I am there. (For we become the place in which we live.) And what is at the core of me? Maybe the contours of the hills and the meeting of sea and sky.

Maybe clouds.

Twenty-six years have passed since I first arrived in California. It was Groundhog Day and I saw many shadows. I stopped along the way and bought a cheap pair of turquoise earrings. Big trucks rumbled along, and there were bleak stretches of scrubby desert, nothing beautiful about it.

I was missing someone. (Always.)

I had stayed for a time in Phoenix. I talked to people in hotels and offices there, people who were fortunate because they had jobs, who were powerful because they might hold a clue or give a blessing. One of them smirked. He worked for the city and sat at a desk. He wore a jacket and tie from Mervyns and he said lots of people would like to quit their lives back east and come to Arizona, lots of people.

That’s when I caught his smirk.

I ran solo laps at a high school track in Tempe, running round and round as the sun sank down behind the bleachers. I ate too much trail mix and carrot cake. I received a deferment on my student loan, a citation for going forty in a school zone, and angry letters from the folks who felt abandoned in New York. I decided to steer to the west and go the rest of the way to California, where at least I could look at the sea. ‘You’re very brave,’ someone said.

I knew that wasn’t true.

Here, now: shifting angles of sunlight, and through the big front window views of buildings shining like aluminum and newly waxed cars and skinny palm trees that are mostly trunk with baffled bursts of foliage on top. I look at my own hands at the keyboard, my never-still hands with their big veins and short nails, hands I've grown fond of. The soundtrack is a mix of people talking business or tapping at computers and the intermittent hiss of the espresso machine and a satellite stream of music that sounds like the love child of folk and easy listening. There’s a couch in the back and a pile of old travel magazines on a table. (Do people sit in here on their lunch breaks dreaming of vacation?) There’s an old dog-eared issue of People too from whose cover Prince William looks up at me skeptically and a headline asks: WILL HE PROPOSE? A woman comes by to admire my computer. ‘Do you like your Apple?’ she inquires, curiously.

Yes, I like my Apple fine.

My mother is in an assisted living facility just a few miles down the street, and I’m here for a visit. Why am I stalling? Oh, I know darned well why I am stalling. It’s because I dread it. It’s hard. I get a knot in my stomach. What will await me when I see her today?

I think I need a little more coffee.

For some reason I am remembering the night I got mugged in Syracuse, the whiteness of the moon, the sound of my steps on the sidewalk, the whispered “now” before they jumped me, the way they held me down and tugged at my purse, my purse with three ten dollar bills. I leapt up and ran after them, fueled by righteous outrage. They were kids. Mean, stupid kids.

I never again walked alone at night.

It was nice having Nancy come over for dinner the other day. She wore a yellow rain coat and yellow rain pants, looking more thirteen than the eighty that she is. My stew was okay, but the bread I baked was ordinary, despite my careful measuring and diligent kneading, and letting it rise, then punching it down and letting it rise yet again. I intended to bake 'an altogether marvelous loaf', as James Beard described it in the recipe, or maybe one that was 'light, chewy, and extremely well crusted' as he said of another. It frequently occurs to me that I’m not especially good at anything. ‘You’re good at being Cynthia,’ a friend once said.

I rest my case.

Can I still learn how to do something entirely new and even do it well? Conventional wisdom says yes. Perhaps with practice and experimentation. But the truth is, I am very lazy. I wonder how I got so lazy.

I’m pretty sure high school did it.

Long Island. A thousand years ago. Someone wrote to me recently who knew about the secret stream beneath the Veteran’s Highway overpass, who had even seen the artesian well with the handprint of the mason in the stone that marks it. I could never find those things again, even if they are there. He said, too, that the Papas are still selling vegetables by the side of the road on Connetquot Avenue. They’re good at growing things, I guess, and staying put. Sometimes, of course, it is necessary to leave. But somewhere along the way, get good at something, that’s what I would advise.

Even if it's a small thing.

And there is nothing more to contemplate except what it means to love. To love this life and this world and the people who matter. There is nothing worth mentioning but duty and forgiveness, and how a smile can make or break a morning, and how the moon ignores me, and the good broad face of the Mexican man in the painting on the wall right here in front of me.

There is nothing more to mention but the need to write if you must write, and no one has to read it and no one has to care.