I finished the day at Starbucks, which is exactly the sort of thing I swore I’d never do. The lobby seating was all taken, so I wedged myself into a corner with my laptop, pretending this was an office and not a place where people shout their orders for caramel drizzle like they’re summoning the dead.
I had twenty minutes to kill between meetings, which was just enough time to delete the emails I’d carefully ignored all day, when an older gentleman shuffled over. I’d noticed him earlier making the slow pilgrimage to the counter for a refill. He moved like he’d been carrying invisible weights for a while and had only just set them down.
He introduced himself by way of medical history: two strokes, recently recovered, glad to be back at Starbucks where the baristas greeted him like a favorite uncle.
“You miss the little things like this,” he said, smiling.
It seemed rude not to respond in kind, so I told him about my own brush with mortality, or at least with liquified chicken. I’d just graduated from the post-weight-loss-surgery diet of protein shakes and pureed meat, which is as bad as it sounds. He nodded gravely. Here was a man who had survived worse, I thiught. Or maybe he had just tasted the same brand of shake.
We compared notes on recovery, on parenting, on Midwestern winters (he’d escaped them ten years ago), and on Florida summers (which are like being trapped in a sauna with God’s disapproval). His son is expecting his first child, which means he and his wife might trade palm trees for grandchildren and move back.
“We rented an Airbnb up there for a few months,” he said. “We’ll see after that.”
We drifted into small talk about sports, health, weather; the sort of conversation you’d find scrawled in the margins of life. Ordinary, unremarkable. Which is to say it was exactly what I’d been missing.
I don’t know when ordinary conversation became extraordinary. Somewhere between the hashtags, the boycotts, and the shouting heads on cable news, we forgot how to chat about anything that didn’t come pre-loaded with outrage. I’ve started and stopped a dozen essays on The State of the Nation, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I always stall out. Every word feels redundant, like adding one more paper cup to a landfill.
What I miss are strangers. Not the ones on Twitter, avatars hurling grenades in any direction, but the kind you meet in line at a coffee shop who tell you about their grandchild or their gallbladder. Once upon a time, this was called “society.” Now it feels like a black-market exchange: one sliver of humanity for another. No refunds.
When my next meeting began to buzz angrily on my laptop, I excused myself. He smiled and introduced himself properly.
“My name’s Tom.”
“Joe,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Good to meet you, too, Joe. God bless you and your family.”
“Same to you, Grandpa Tom.”
His grin at that was enormous, like he’d just been promoted to the title he’d wanted all along.
It wasn’t a solution to anything. Not to politics, or polarization, or the abyss that yawns open every time I turn on the news. But it was something, a brief truce with a stranger in the kingdom of burnt espresso. And for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, that felt like enough.