Adam’s Droppings

 

By Teresa Tam

Coffee was grinding, and the Television screen on the café wall mirrored the people revolving around me. I was in a coffee place-- the Free Speech Movement café. My observation began with Proust. Strangely enough, Proust was a writer who searched for the hidden jewels of conversation like garnets inside a boulder of granite.

“Isn’t he amazing?”

It was a shadowed face, behind a setting sun. The mysterious shadow started a long cycle of eavesdropping that still follows me today.

“Who?” I said, half way shutting my eyes to avoid the sun rays.

“Proust.” He explained that he had only read bits and pieces, and that each piece offered wisdom about the big L's of loving and living.

His name was Rishi, and he said he was a poet. We switched between the typical icebreakers common in caffeine shops: a summary of each other’s politics, an exchange of names, the commonly used but completely necessary question: “What’s your major?” in between a mix of odd topics, including origins, interests, and favorite types of music. Maybe Proust really was affecting my judgment, but in the end, I felt that I knew Rishi less. To really know him I would have to watch and listen.

I eavesdropped as I hid behind the pages of Proust, in a drawn-out attempt at grasping the essence of his character. Within 10 minutes of watching, he emerged as a character with a real face (rather than a shadowed one). As the sun fell to the horizon, his life was revealed to me. His character sprang out like a jack-in-the-box.

I began to gain mastery over the background noises of grinding coffee, news of the Pope's election from the television, and the quiet voices of technical conversations about functions and variables. Unimportant noises drowned into the background like ocean waves. All of the café peoples' voices seemed like smooth rocks rolling along the ocean shore.

Rishi was the odd albatross who made himself heard. He was helping correct the fiction of a blonde haired British girl sitting next to him. Rishi was a harsh critic. Observation #1, I carefully scribbled in a blank page of Swann’s Way.

Being a girl, I don't know much about winning a beautiful blonde British girl’s heart, but to me Rishi seemed to be going about this the wrong way. First, he revealed his odd character right off by reading her work-in-progress without her permission, as she left for a cell phone break. Even in Britain, this would be considered an invasion of privacy, wouldn't it? Upon returning, she seemed unaffected; perhaps she knew him. So much for me being the all-knowing narrator.

The British girl, who can be "Isabelle" for the purposes of this self-reflective essay (thank you Henry James), accepted his honest (sometimes very harsh) remarks. Isabelle’s paper had too many metaphors, he said. She had 'poor analogies.'

She asked for a good example.

Rishi said a sentence without hesitation: “…like a hot-air balloon shot down in plastic deflation.”

I thought his sentence was poetic, so I wrote it onto a piece of notepaper. I swallowed the last of my Mocha, saddened by the absence of chocolate. Most of the chocolate stuck to the bottom of my cup. I tried to recover the bittersweet sediments (it hid the fact that I was spying on Isabelle and Rishi).

Rishi was sweating, which puzzled me. Was he nervous? Or did he just not realize that it was a cool 60 degrees in the Café with both doors open to the air? He got up and said goodbye to Isabelle. I tried to hide my notes from his eyes. As quick as his unique character came into view, it left. Only a few pieces of paper show that, one day, he revealed himself to an observer without knowing it.

As I watched Rishi leave the door, Isabelle’s voice revealed itself from the other smooth rocks in the ocean surf. A new character was now available for spying. Her conversation with another man (let's call him John Doe #1, a chubby, curly-haired blonde in retro-glasses) served as another subject to write about. John D. discussed Rishi’s strange behavior with Isabelle. She replied with similar remarks against the poet who just tore her hard work apart.

The following day, I saw John D. He walked into the café looking desperately for Isabelle. After realizing that she was not there, and might not return, his face showed a sadness that can't be described. It was a sadness that you would have to see for yourself to truly understand. John D. lost his dream girl.

What is it, exactly, that I found in the café? The "trivial" and "banal" is far from trivial. These people, that I had always taken for granted by turning them into ocean sounds with no meaning, turned into people with a face. I always thought that people were only really cruel, honest, nervous, or hopelessly desiring someone in fiction, or in a movie.  To me, people in a café were only gears in the mechanism of life. Who knew that each of those gears served a certain purpose, and that if any were missing (imagine how this world would be without Shakespeare, Rishi, Einstein, or John D.), the clock wouldn't tick; we would all just be an ocean of people. 

However cliché it may sound, I found that life is its own literature. I think it was Shakespeare who said that the world is a stage, but my opinion is that it's the opposite. Our concept of the stage, our stories and dramatic interpretation are taken from the world. Without the world, there would be no stage. The stage is the world, and it is condensed into a small area and hidden by a curtain in order for us to better understand each other as people.

According to the online Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, The café began in Persia in the 16^th century.  It was a place for "men to assemble to drink coffee or tea, listen to music, play chess and backgammon, perhaps hear a recitation from the Shahnameh." Recently, it has become much more widespread. Since the 16^th century, not much has changed. There are now more of these places around the world. Sometimes, it's hard for me to imagine that there are literally hundreds of thousands of these places, and within each one,  stories of people are being told.  It all makes life much more meaningful.

Isabelle, Rishi, and John D were the four personalities I encountered on that spring day in 2005. True to the spirit of the café, their speech flowed freely, stripping their lives bare to a café-goer who once unknowingly took for granted the bizarre, exciting, epic stories that can be garnered from a simple 2$ cup of Mocha.