Fair Trade

I used to spend an exorbitant amount of time writing in diners and coffee shops. This was back before motherhood, before I kept jobs longer than the average three-month stretch. This was before barn chores and a mortgage and before I went grocery shopping weekly at the same grocery store and even went so far as to write lists so as not to forget basic household favorites. This was before the household.

At that time, the bottomless cup of coffee still existed. Maybe it was because the kind of places I frequented didn't sell organic, fair-trade coffees. Maybe it was because my favorite place was a silver diner called Palooka Joe's and it's patrons were mostly the down and outs in the dowtown area. I would sit at the bar sometimes learning sign language from Michael, my favorite down and out. He had big aluminum baskets on both ends of his bicycle, worked odd jobs for money and had no sense of hearing. For a long time, our exchanges consisted of words cluttered on paper placemats but I had had a deaf boyfriend in high school and so had learned the ESL alphabet. It was slow communication but I had time and was open and he was homeless and weathered. He loved the opportunity to sit with a young pretty girl and I.... I just needed substance. I was desperately searching for anything other than the hum-drum, mundane reality of middle class white America and all that came with that.

In the closet in the guest room of our 150 year old, crooked farmhouse is a black and purple bag, stuffed to the top with fat, little CVS spiral-bound notebooks. None of them are dated, there are likely more than a dozen, and in order to put them in any kind of sequence I would have to sit down and force myself to read through them. Force myself back into that time in my life. I always tell myself that someday I will put myself to the task. But it's been more than a decade since those fat, little spiral bound notebooks and more than a decade of healing old wounds. My new journals are formatted differently. I've begun to think in full sentences, starting combing my hair, stopped taking so many drugs and gave birth to new muse.

But I do miss my homeless friends. I miss Benjamin, who, instead of introducing himself right off, walked up to my table at a little downtown deli and asked me if I was writing love letters in those notebooks. I told him that I didn't write love letters and conceded that I was writing poetry (something I rarely admitted at that time in my life). He took a deep breath, grinned, and proceeded to recite the Raven line by line. A few minutes into his performance, he held up one finger, turned around and ordered a cup of coffee and came back to my table and asked if he might join me. The friendship was sealed already but he gave me more of the Raven, his life story and there would be days to come where we would meet up on the square and I would play harmonica while he would play a borrowed guitar. Oftentimes, the other old buddies would be nearby playing cards or checkers on the stone benches.

Back then, I was dodging the ghosts of a love gone bad and a given up pregnancy. I was medicating myself with lots of weed, a little speed, alot of booze and music and sex and dancing. I've always thought of those years as the golden years, as the Great Distraction. I was dancing out there on the very thin limbs of my own branches. Dreaming of houses with no windows, no roofs, and many rooms. Dreaming of little girls that might have been my own. I was writing the story of my life in scattered sentences over drip coffee, good company and fried eggs. And late at night, after the bands had packed up, I'd walk barefoot into the dark alleys to find my old buddies on some abandoned porch and they'd scold me for wearing no shoes as I'd sit there on the broken step pulling a sliver of glass out of the heel of my foot. I'd loan them smokes. They'd loan me their stories. It seemed a very fair trade.

I'm sitting here now in a coffee shop in a prime tourist New England town, a couple of blocks from where I work. In the place of a fat, little notebook or a placemat, I have my old, slow laptop. I've graduated from see-through coffee to a chai latte and I'm not stoned. There are no homeless people reciting poetry to me, this is not a silver diner and I am no longer in an old blue-collar mining town. Just some nice tables and chairs and the constant drone of the espresso machine.

My fingers move much faster on a keyboard than they do with a pen and paper and I think now in full sentences. My attempts at making sense of my life come easier and my ghosts are so much more transparent. I shake their hands now, pull up a chair and offer to buy them all a cup of coffee.