Sat at Another Bar,
(the lack of need to improperly capitalize makes me giggle alone in my head)
I sip my Titos-And-Soda-And-A-Tiny-Splash-Of-Cran, then flip one page back, halfway through section two. I’ve rehearsed my speech, if anybody that knows me asks. “It’s broken into four relationships. If you’ve visited this specific cafe with someone, you can go there to have another conversation. But it won’t change the future, and you can only talk until your coffee gets cold.”
There are other rules to it – like how if your coffee gets cold before the conversation ends, you’ll be eternally stuck in the cafe – but they feel beyond need to mention in casual conversation.
I scan One Page Back. I close the book.
I listen to a friend laugh.
–
I replay the evening I sat at Table 1 or 2 or 3, trying to sketch the first assignment for my Fashion Design class. I enrolled on a twenty year whim. “Gather ’round!” – even now, I hear my dad’s high-pitched imitation as precisely as if I’m sitting on carpeted Blue Hill stairs. The dinner bell. Once All Four Child Units reported to the stairs, we’d receive a re-enactment of every detail of the night’s preparations, narrated in the same Gunn-ing tone. This was a well-beloved, regular performance.
But I’m a lousy drawer, I always have been. I’ve also never practiced, because I usually quit when things are not easy.
The assignment was to channel the characteristics of two different animals into one avant-garde design. I tried merging chameleon ridges with peacock feathers and fish scales with snake fangs and monarch wings with panther eyes. Everything started intentional and became a mess.
The same friend sat down next to me, at Table 1 or 2 or 3. He flipped through my sketches. His eyes seemed to be considering. At that point, I still wasn’t sure if he liked me – were his occasional eye-rolls a sign he considered me a friend, or that he painstakingly counted down the minutes left on our shifts?
He picked up one of my pencils, asked me for a new page, and began to draw. “I spent a lot of days doing this after school,” he told me. A few minutes passed, then he pushed his page towards me. “You could try something like this.” (I don’t remember what he drew. I wish I did.)
I felt warm. heavy-eyed. “Thank you. I wish I could draw like that. You’re really good.”
“I just told you,” he laughed back, “I used to do this a lot. I didn’t start good.”
I dropped the class two weeks later. I would never have enough time to practice.
–
I finish my Titos-And-Soda-And-A-Tiny-Splash-Of-Cran, and say goodbye. I send a little smooch to the bar puppy. On my walk home, I decide tomorrow I will ask a friend to give me a one month deadline: By September 12, I will have successfully hemmed at least one item in my four storage boxes full of “one-day-I-will-learn” pieces.
Let happiness win 