Twenty, twenty-five-years ago, a Berkeley City College student started coming to the café where I took morning breaks. She was Mexican American, with pouty lips, a low-back tattoo, and a glorious torrent of black hair falling across and below her shoulders. She was a cousin of a barista, and soon was working part time behind the counter. When she returned a bracelet, I had lost, I offered to reward her, but she declined, so I left $20 in the tip jar.
..
Maybe fifteen years later I was in the café that I had come to after my heart attacks and retirement, and she came in. “Excuse me,” I said, “but didn’t you used to work at Firenze?”
“A long time ago.” She was nicely dressed, I recall, and looking well.
“I remember your long hair.”
“Oh yes.” She smiled. “My hair.”
“How are you?”
“I have a son.” Her smile widened and brightened as if a most wonderful thing beyond likelihood and imagination had happened.
..
For ten years. I go to the same café. A plump Mexican American woman enters, accompanied by a tall, thin boy in a Berkeley High School jacket. The day before a fixture in the Mt. Rushmore of Bay Area counterculture for decades had posted at FB a still of Janet Leigh’s face as she flees with her stolen $40,000 in Psycho, a film he had seen when in the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka. I’d messaged, “And you probably had less of an idea what life had in store for you than she did.”
This time the woman recognizes me. We ask each other how we have been. She recalls my bracelet and I display my current one. I say I write books. She says she cleans houses. “And this must be your son.” His shy smile reveals a solid strip of braces below his lower lip.
We each say it is nice to see the other. I believe we both enjoy and appreciate these moments remembered, the thoughts recalled, whatever we made – or make – of them, the wonder of standing together in a shared instant upon a spinning globe.