Coffee

So I was watching Forrest Gump tonight, missing home a lot, and I thought about the line, “you can tell a lot about people by their shoes...blah blah,” and I thought about this morning.

Last night, well yesterday afternoon really, I found myself with not a lot to do and a beautiful sunny afternoon stretched out before me. So my friend Andy and I were chatting on facebook and I was talking about how pathetic it was that I’d lived in France for over a year and a half and had hardly seen any of it. So we decided to seize the moment, buy ridiculously over priced train tickets and head up to the capital of gastronomy for the evening to have dinner in Lyon.

It was a great spontaneous trip, our train ended up being delayed on the way up, so we just decided to get a hotel and stay the night too. A fortuitous stroke of luck, or happy coincidence while wandering, found us in the oldest part of one of the oldest cities in France in a hotel next to a bar with 50 different kinds of beers (My kind of night man). It was an epic evening, complete with gastronomic delights...and some not so delightful, yummy beer, fun and sometimes interesting people and being mooned by a frenchman...that was definitely a first for me.

Anyhow, this morning as we were walking to the train we popped into a coffee shop for a morning fix and as we sat in silence (completely drained from the night before) I perused our French counterparts in the café and noted their comings and goings. What was a hustling and bustling cafe very quickly dissipated into just me, Andy, the table next to us and their poodle (yes, poodle in the coffee shop, I had to squash the urge to drop kick it...I dislike small dogs, especially small bitchy French ones who eat croissant out of their owners hands and disrupt my morning coffee by barking and hurting my hangover..ha).

I looked up as a group of old men came into the shop together...really old guys, with fantastic beards, canes and hats, dressed like something out of the 1950’s, they were French old-school. I watched as they sat down, exchanged pleasantries with the barmaid and went about their very obviously daily routine. It got me thinking about habits and daily routines and how different we are from country to country...strictly speaking the US and France anyway.

In America, we haul ass to stand in ridiculous lines at Starbucks all the while tolerating the abnormal chipperness of the baristas in anticipation of our much needed caffeine fix. Then we tuck the scone/muffin/fruit cup into our handbag/briefcase/purse/tote bag and hurry off to our train/car/taxi/walk to wherever it is we’re off to on the day. The only pleasantries exchanged are those maybe between us and another cranky customer or the barista.

The French, saunter into a café, sit down, wait their turn for when the barman/maid feels the spirit to look in their general direction, because of course, they have the control; they don’t work for tips, and they don’t care how cranky you get waiting for your fix. But the real French customer doesn’t mind this, they understand it’s about the experience just as much as it’s about the caffeine. They’ll take out their paper/book/iphone, nibble on their freshly bought croissant/pain au chocolat/baguette from the pâtisserie next door, light up their cigarette, blow it inconveniently in your direction and heave a weighty sigh releasing the morning’s clearly obvious tensions. Sometimes they’ll even just gaze off into the distance, pondering the quandaries of their 4 day work week no less, or chat to their friends; the important difference though, is their process.

They’re not in a hurry, they don’t care if they get to work on time, hell, they don’t really care if they get there a half hour late...it’s a nationally understood thing, that there’s always a good reason, and they’re never questioned.

Back to Forrest Gump though, thinking about his shoes got me thinking about my coffee experience and how you can tell just as much about a person by the way they do things. In France we have the saying, “Les américains vivent de travailler, les français travaillent pour vivre,” which means, Americans live to work, French work to live. I’d have to say, that nails it right on the head though. Watching the French go through their coffee routine, I remember one day when I was just trying to be French in the way I drank my coffee. But when I tried to take my time, I was confounded by the order in which to do my actions, cigarette first? Then sugar in the coffee? Then croissant???...damn, instead of lighting my cigarette with the hand stuffing my muffin into my bag while pressing my phone to my shoulder so I can talk while running down the street and trying not to spill my hot coffee in the other hand on myself all at once like usual, I had no idea which order to do things in when I was doing them one at a time.

France has been really good for me in that way, learning how to slow down and take my time. I’m sure I’ve written about it before in one of my earlier chapters.

Right now I find myself having a really hard time finding my balance, finding the right amount of actually “being” here and not already living back at home in the US in anticipation of my re-entry this summer. I’m trying to take my own advice and do things one at a time, but it’s not without difficulty. It’s been a real exercise in thought control, forcing myself to be here, in this moment, right now, instead of 6 months ahead of time in where I think I want my new life to be once I get back. It’s not without effort, this is something that’s always been a constant struggle in my life, and it’s an important battle to conquer I think, because looking back, I regret and see so much that I missed out on in the moment while I was waiting for the future. I don’t want to regret, and I don’t want to look back and wish I’d done things differently. All I really want to do is matter, I want to know that I used my powers for something good and that I made a difference somehow, somewhere, to someone. I guess what I’m trying to say, is I don’t want to die with all my thoughts still inside me, and if you ever need a lesson in trying to matter, the best thing I’ve learned so far is to just sit down and have a coffee:)

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