I was on a hunt for the best bag of beans in the city. I had never been to this coffee shop before — it was tucked away in an alley so I would never have found it without the Coffee Shop app. The lineup was short.
I had just asked for a pound of their strongest when a woman standing slightly behind me told the clerk to give me a pound of Bavarian Delight, then told me I should try that before I tried their strongest, French Delux, which, she informed, was very strong and quite acidic — the very taste I was looking for. But I'm not unappreciative; I went with the Bavarian Delight though I really wanted the French (and made a mental note to come back for it).
I do my own grinding so I had my bag in a few minutes and was paying when the woman said over my shoulder that she was just about to have a coffee, would I like to join her? I would have politely declined but I had the time and I had just this morning renewed a on-going pledge to myself to get out and about more often and be more social; I had gradually become something of a recluse. So even though I didn't want to, I accepted and I was soon sitting across from a woman I didn't know hearing about a blend I knew nothing about.
Her name I learned is Konrada; it's Polish, her parents immigrated years ago; she was born here although she said she was conceived there — 'a last poke in the Old Country' her father had told her. Then she told me she recognized me from a picture in the paper last month. I had won a writing award for my first novel, The Devil's Apron, a book, surprisingly, she had not only read but claimed to have loved.
"You have a load of talent," she said just before she was interrupted by a woman about her age who stopped by to question Konrada about why she recently left her job (she had been working too many hours; she needed a change). She is an accountant I learned from their conversation before I quickly finished my coffee and extricated myself waving goodbye.
As I drove home I reflected, not for the first time, on how isolating it is to be a writer, especially one who conjures stories from an imagination tempered, not from actual experiences, but from imagined perceptions — I don't have to actually do to feel; I don't have to endure to imagine; I don't have to fight or to love to write about it. My agent claims I am 'sensitively intuitive;' she says I'm adept at 'writing first hand accounts from third hand experiences.'
I'm not at all sure she's right. I am beginning to think I am a one book wonder: my one effort might have been wildly successful because I used up every original thought I've ever had. The thing I'm working on now has become an almost agonizing struggle because I am discovering I am a product of not only my enveloping isolation but my entirely middle class sensibilities. I am actually thinking of taking up boxing: I am in deep need of physicality. And I know I need to be roughed up.
In truth, I am turning into a narcissistic depressive and in the process becoming very old well before my years.
I liked the coffee but I knew I'd go back to the shop for the real thing the moment I ran out of it. I had just finished my third cup at 11:30, as always, when my doorbell rang. It never rings. She was there, the woman from yesterday's coffee shop, the woman with the Polish name; she was standing there with a bag in her hand. "I brought us some lunch," she said and almost muscled her way past me taking the bag through the hallway into the kitchen where, without asking or saying much of anything, she went through my cupboards looking for plates and glasses and, as I stood there stupefied, she soon had the food all laid out on the kitchen table and was pouring the milk.
"I don't drink milk," I said, trying to assert at least some control.
"You should, it's good for you." She sat down and began to plate the sushi, just assuming I wanted to eat raw fish at 11:39 in the morning. I didn't but I sat down obediently anyway and picked up the chopsticks, noting that this was the second time in as many days that she was coercing me into doing something I didn't want to do.
"Are you wondering why I'm here?" When she smiled she showed about as much of her glistening pink gums as her long white teeth — and there appeared way too many of them and they made such a tight U in her mouth that it almost looked like a V, giving her face a pinched look and when she smiled or grinned her rising upper lip reminded me of a raising awning, not an attractive look in a not very pretty face. I didn't have to answer, she told me. "I wanted to get to you before you're famous — then you won't have a listed phone number, never mind a listed address."
"When I'm famous," I repeated, sardonically.
"You will be ... you almost are now. You're working on your second book?"
"Labouring on my second book." I admitted, before trying a little of the sushi, or the rice part of it.
"Not going well?"
I looked over at her, actually really looking at her for the first time. She looks sober and solemn until she gets that dreadful gummy grin that gives her an almost comical look. "I'm wondering why you're here."
"So am I, but here I am — you have to eat."
I pushed the plate away. "But not this, I hate sushi and I hate it even more in the morning ... and I hate using chopsticks because I've never mastered them."
Man, did she take this the wrong way: rather than cower with the reprimand, she took it as a teaching moment. She changed chairs immediately to the one beside me and for the next 10 minutes she demonstrated with the sticks, manipulating my grip, repositioning my fingers, encouraging me and soon I had it well enough to pick up a grain of rice from the table top. It was then that I realized I had eaten pretty much everything in front of me.
"You're a quick learner," she said, smiling her gums, "and you don't hate sushi at all, you just don't like the thought of it — and you're going to love the effect of it: it's a wonderful energy source; it burns clean without any of the pollution you're probably used to."
"I liked your coffee," trying to show some appreciation.
"Good," she said, getting up and taking the plates to the sink where she washed them as I drank the last of my milk. Then, like an apparition walking through a wall, she was gone, that's the way it felt: here one moment (uninvited), gone the next (unannounced).
And back again at suppertime, back again with a bigger bag in her hand, this time with only a half-gum smile before she shouldered her way past me.
My day is a routine, seven days a week. I write in the morning from 7 to 11:30, have lunch in front of the same cable TV news program, then research, pay bills and do whatever else has to be done (buy coffee) before I go for a walk at 2:30 — I head out my backdoor and follow the ravine north or south to connect to adjoining trails for at least a two hour walk, often much longer. It's on these walks that I do all my story thinking — I dictate my ideas and much of my dialogue into my iPhone and organize it all into my computer when I get back home. So my afternoon walks generate all my next morning's work; my creative pattern would be ruined if I didn't keep the cycle going.
