Black and White

I take my tall decaf to the street.  That’s where there is life and color and smells that are foreign.  I just did my ‘good deed’ inside Starbucks.  The lady with the Starbucks gift card and the gold tooth had a balance of $1.42 and an appetite of about $1.60.  And even the cheapest item on the menu was more than she had.  That one dollar and sixty-cent cookie was more than she had.  And even so, she didn’t want the cookie.  I knew it.  She was settling for the cookie; yet she wasn’t even able to “settle.”  I didn’t want her to settle and I could almost feel the discomfort and embarrassment in her awkward shuffle.  She needed $.18.  I told the barista I would make up the difference for what she wanted in the case.    I didn’t actually see what she upgraded to, but just placed 2 dollar bills on the counter.  She thanked me, I think.  The barista mentioned something about her ‘paying it forward,’ and she tried to explain that she already had…I really wasn’t listening and didn’t really care if she paid it forward or not.  I just didn’t want her to be uncomfortable or embarrassed.  I hate that, myself.

          On the street at the bistro table with the green umbrella and concrete flooring, there is comfort.  Not your typical, run-of-the-mill comfort, but soul comfort; comfort that comes from being awake.  This intersection, kitty-corner from Janus Landing where the tattooed and costumed people parade, has a personality that isn’t described; it is sensed.  It is experienced.  And tonight, even without the costumed people or the sound of underground bands tuning up, there is personality.  I first notice the barista, on a break…a smoking and writing break.  I am fascinated by his tiny handwriting quickly filling the page; the perfect crisp white pages quickly soaking up line after line of jet black ink.  As I smell the sweet smoke from his cigarette, I wonder if his thoughts are as black and white.  But I find that baristas who sit at tables on sidewalk streets, smoking Swisher Sweets, and writing incessantly in pink journals rarely have black and white thoughts.  After all, if they are so black and white, what’s the point in committing them to paper?  What’s the use in wasting all that precious crisp white paper and jet black ink with other people’s thoughts;  thoughts that have flowed from peoples’ pens hundreds of thousands of times…to be read once?