After Marilyn told Adele that she and Grif were packing winter clothes for the Buddhist retreat in New Mexico, Adele asked me if New Mexico wasn’t hot.
“They have mountains,” I said, “and mountains have snow.”
“Do all mountains have snow?”
“Come to think of it, why should any mountains have snow? Aren’t they closer to the sun? Shouldn’t deserts have the snow?”
“When you’re at the café, ask Fran.”
Besides being an licensed electrician, free jazz musician on instruments of his own creation, reader of the most daunting Oulipo works, and maker of art postcards based on mathematical calculations that he sends family, friends, waitresses, and people he meets in cafes. (I have three), Fran is the kind of guy you can ask about mountains and snow. He was answering my question through improvisations on planetary rotation, wind direction, reflection of light, absorption of heat, when I noticed a dark-haired, 60ish woman at the next table, who had been making notes in a spiral bound pad, turn more and more toward us.
“I think we’re disturbing this woman,” I said.
“Oh no,” she said. “I’m interested in what you’re saying.”
Which led to a conversation in which we learned (a) her name was Melissa; (b) she was in Berkeley visiting her son; (c) she taught “in Cambridge,” which, since she had no Brit accent, I sensed was code for “at Harvard”; and (d) all of us had read – what were the chances? – When We Cease to Understand the World. Fran and I had liked it, but she had not because of the liberties Labatut had taken with the lives of physicians and mathematicians she knew. “Of course, it’s fiction but…”
Her notes had been for a course for STEM students, “Writing and Thinking,” to which they had great resistance. “They can’t write. They don’t read. They can’t see why they should. It won’t advance them professionally.” She set down her cup. “It won’t make them money.”
“Who do you have them read?” I said. “For me, in freshman English Comp, it was Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language,’ and that worked.”
“These aren’t freshmen. They read Fenneman, Einstein,…” a couple Germans I had not heard of but Fran had.
Melissa had come to the café because her son had said she might meet interesting people. At the moment, besides us, were a plumber, a professor emeritus (anthropology), an ex-city accountant, an engineer (retired), and a concert oboe-ist, sharing a long table, discussing birding and Robert Kennedy, Jr. When we said they resumed their conversation every morning, her eyes widened. “No women?”
“One will be here soon,” Fran said. “She’s 94, a retired ballerina, who can still stand on one foot and lift the other above her head.”
“In an hour, there will be a new crowd,” I added. “And after lunch, another one entirely.”
“And who’s the most interesting person?”
“Fran,” I said.
“Bob,” Fran said.
He tried to steer her toward Most Outrageous; Lollipop; IWKYA, but she wasn’t buying.[1] I said if she’d self-address a card, Fran would send it to her. She chose his black-on-white, single-line abstract configuration, based on sand-graphics of the Cokwe people of Mozambique/ Angola. You never know, I thought, what the café may bring you.
After she left, I learned her last name from the card and Googled. The first woman tenured in Harvard’s physics department, Melissa had co-discovered the top quark and Higgs Bosun. The most interesting person may require recalibration.
The next morning, checking out, she sweetly told Fran he had almost gotten snow right.
..
Note
[1]. For readers unfamiliar with my processes, every morning I sit in the café offering some of the books I have written for sale. Then I present a written account of my interactions, “Adventures in Marketing”at www.theboblevin.com. This has been going on for 398 weeks. I view it as performance art. Others may disagree.