Sometimes we get each other and sometimes, we don’t get. I know this because my favourite cafe today ran out of cups. The man standing behind me in the queue said to his girlfriend, “Dishwasher’s on the blink again,” and she told their little caramel dog, “Awww, dah dishhwashhah!” while the dog looked up adoringly.
I was queuing behind a man in board shorts whom I had greeted, “Are you the close of the queue?” He looked a little startled, then he smiled. “Reckon I am,” he said, and I said, “I’ll take over those duties if you like.” We were laughing now, just a little. “You can put in a shift,” he agreed, and I said, “I mean, I’ll take it on. Someone else is gunna arrive and ask, this the end of the queue, and I’ll tell them, yes it is! It’s only the one time, but it’s arduous.”
We had run out of things to say but now there was a rapport between us so we couldn’t switch straight back to automatons. And because my friendliness is partly anxiety, I noticed he was having to twitch himself out of the reach of the dried curls of jasmine wreathing the verandah post beside him, which kept reaching for him and snatching at his hair. I pulled out of them free and tucked it into the basket of dried branches it had sprung from, saying cheerfully, “That thing just really wants to get to know you!” and he turned as he finally noticed this source of annoyance saying, “Ohh! You’re right, it really really does.” There were still four people between us and the till were we would place orders and we would have had to resort to gazing studiously away from each other, maybe even whistling or humming a little, all that fakery; but he said, in a kind of gasp of social endeavour, “Reckon they could afford to give these plants of bit of water!” I glanced up. The verandah roof is high and four former or alleged potplants dangle, quietly weeping dead brown tendrils into the air. When he reached the till I fell away, and we both turned back between his order and mine to say, “Have a good one,” and now we were done.
I took an Uber home because I have an injury just now from an idiotic but cataclysmic pushbike accident. I had to go through the kind of surgery a surgeon calls, rather comfortably, “minor.” The Uber driver had a grey and black striped handkerchief tucked in at the top of his driver-side window for keeping off the sun. I said, “Is that the flag of your own individual people: the Nation of You.” And he said, “No, no, it’s a handkerchief,” so I said, “Yes, I know, I was just playing.” A silence. We were not of the nation of each other. And I said, “Just I think it would be so awesome if everybody had their own individual flag and maybe a coat of arms! to wave out the window in traffic. Once in a while you’d spot someone with a similar flag to your own and then the two of you would become best friends.”
Did I mention this everyday friendliness which seems to come so naturally is also in part anxiety, in part yearning?
“Oh,” he said. “That’s funny.” And we talked about the big trees along the road, which are highways for Brisbane’s possums. At my gate he pulled over very gently and I stepped very gingerly down and said, thrusting my fist in the air and indicating the flag, “Viva la Revolution!”
My driver said, apologetically, “It’s actually a handkerchief,” and I tried to let him off the hook on which I had not intended to hoist him: “Yes. I was just joking with you. Thank you for this peaceful ride, have a great day!” And as I pushed back the gate which like so much of this city if overhung by trees I was thinking how even the kin-man and I, the one the jasmine at the cafe was fingering, could have estranged ourselves and caused a brief sore rupture if either one of us had only hung round three or four seconds too long once we’d reached the register. We both understood the same rules: the rules of playfulness, only some of which are THERE ARE NO RULES. The coffee was really good. I gave the thirsty peace lily in the bathroom some water.
Tag: cafe culture
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kept & cupped
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in armful’s way
Looked up from my crouching position in the gutter to see this luscious young woman who works in my local deli. Uh, I said, I’m just taking some footage of this water rippling down the stones… look how beautiful it is! I rescued these from the bins at work, she replied, holding out her armful of red roses and yellow day-lilies. Do you want a bunch?
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worldburn
Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men.
A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in the window and sat down. He was wearing shorts, dusty boots, and no shirt. His belly sagged between his knees. I thought, this is not one of those seaside towns where people wander in and out of the ocean all day and stand in bikinis eating chips. Wherever a woman would not wear swimming gear, a man needs to put on his shirt.
The waitress barged in, late from having missed her bus. She flung down her bag and began telling the staff about her room, which had ‘nearly burned down’ overnight. She described it as the latest in a chain of events which made her wonder had someone put the evil eye on her. What she described was entirely self-generated. She left ‘my candles going’ but ‘only for a minute’, while she was out of the house at the shops. A poster fell down, into a flame.
‘My whole wall got burnt.’ Her housemate put the fire out. If not for that housemate, ‘my whole room would have burned down,’ not to mention the rest of the house. When I looked up, the man with no shirt had taken his coffee and his bare chest and belly out into the cool, breezy day and disappeared. I was reading the foreword to a recipe book, Indian Spice. Its author Pinky Leilani described the importance of recipes in that culture, that they are handed down and closely kept secret. To cook well is a form of power and a source of income in a difficult, impoverished land.
She described how long it took before the family cook, a man in his sixties, had learned to trust her and share with her his recipes. He taught her to cook. Now she has published those secret recipes to the world, they belong to all of us and have lost their power, the power belongs to her. -
her blonde fall
Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay cold here for months. Flowers are still standing on people’s balconies but the sky behind the buildings has soured. My little blue mug marches with me every morning past the Turkish men playing backgammon and the local alcoholics gathering outside the convenience store to drink beer. The prospect of seeing no blue sky nor hearing birdsong til May or even June is so terribly daunting to a tropical heart. It is cold and dim and it’s going to get colder and darker; the ground will freeze solid; the rivers will freeze over; it is going to be cold and dark, always cold, colder and darker and dimmer til Spring.
The little cafe is brimming with people and music. I used to come in and write here, every day, back in 2012; that was six or seven sublets ago. I am aware as I move out of the way a third time, waiting for the Australian barista to pour, that my order, in Melbourne barista-speak, is a suburban why bother. A cafe owner in Northcote once translated the name to my face, jauntily, making rapid notes, then looked up and saw my eyes had filled with tears of mortification and exclusion. Poor guy. He spent the rest of the morning hustling my friend and me to ever choicer patches of dappled sun and offering us sample cakes and sandwiches. It’s just convenient, he lied, in a fluster. Extra hot is suburban. Decaf is why bother. In a culture which preens itself on hardiness and how many coffees everybody ‘needs’ to get through their demanding day, to drink caffeine free with a scalded milk froth is like walking unemployed into a cocktail party of the leisured, mannered, drunken wealthy and asking for a glass of milk.
I’ve done that too.
As the sky closes over our heads we turn within, I guess, a more meditative season. My heart aches after the email from my father today about the cosy family holiday they had, a farmstay with all the little children: like the childhoods we had, on our grandparents’ farm, a place now sold and probably built out. I’m in exile and I can’t go back. But as the natural landscape pleaches us in with its monotones of winter sleep, maybe that of the humans around me will brighten and deepen and welcome me in. The golden daytime candles are sat out on cafe tables already. The smooth endless music rolls forth. There’s the wintry rattle of cars over stones. The changing colours on the market, from bright summer fruits to rich, bruising plums and sprays of spinach, and beets. Two or three weeks ago we cycled miles out of town to a garden party, livid with lanterns. We swam in two lakes and ate breads and preserves our hosts had made, and felt sleepy at table. A large dog thumped her tail under the bench seat. At 2 o’clock in the morning on the quiet train home I lay huddled against the glass divider, replete. A woman got on and plumped herself against the opposite side of the glass. She dropped her head back and sighed. She had a glorious fall of long blonde hair, different colours of blonde, salon tipped, which flattened out against the glass as she took out her phone, compressing like a river of gemstones into one two-dimensional clotted sky after another as she turned her head. I lay sleepy with my face pressed into her hair, but for the glass, and I now recall it: and winter stings me, but there’s always the heaven of us.
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sugar no sugar
Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to convey ‘honey’ I first had to mime little fluttering motions with my elbows trapped by my sides, saying repeatedly ‘azucar, non azucar’ (sugar, not sugar)… When I finally spotted a squeezer of honey on the shelf and pointed to it, the assembled staff turned to each other and started mimicking my mime, going, “Ahhhh, *miele*…”
I love languages but know none apart from German, decayed Bahasa Indonesia, and some shreds of truly pathetic French. But Spanish is glorious. I learned yesterday from some friends who run a bookshop that ‘vacuum cleaner’ is, in English translation, ‘the aspirator’ – that which inhales everything. But let’s not get too carried away – to use that other, far less celebratory phrase: as far as I’m concerned, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I’m with Nature.
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Kaffeewitzenkraft
We tried out a new coffee house, on our bicycles. Actually it was an old cafe, one of Brisbane’s earliest, in a dingy nook at the entrance to the gold-crusted cinemas on Queen Street. However it’s been done up like an ageing aunt, trussed in striped golden paper and with those little dinky tables too small to spread a newspaper. He ordered his coffee and I ordered mine. I was put off by the newly-renovated smell but rooted to the spot by the Abba album they were playing – the actual album, the whole thing, the impeccable swirling piano and harmonies. We stayed to listen.
One coffee seems never enough. I’ve fallen into the maw of first world greed. I stood up and wound my way back to the counter, the guy pouring showy, almost effortless lattes one after another. He had an Olympic flag of empty white-mouthed cups and was swirling them full rapidly. Another coffee? he asked, seeing me standing there watching. I said, Yes please. Decaf –
He finished for me. “Extra extra hot with some honey on the side.” Yes, I said. “And do you want another of the espressos?” No, I said: He hated his.
I always hold my breath, risking a joke against a stranger. They might not get it. They might decide to stiffen and feel attacked. The last customer might have been horribly rude. He swung away from me to open the till and as he did so, a great guffaw of laughter like a cough came out of him and he fell forward from the waist, laughing luxuriously. Phew. I went back to our tiny table and told my partner, in barista world my kind of coffee would be “a suburban why-bother.”