Free Coffee

My local convenience store has free coffee on Friday mornings, so I went in there this morning after I’d gotten gas. I live way out in the country so the way the place is busy is always a little entertaining to me. But there was a line to get the coffee, and the manager of the place was making another pot. He already had at least one other pot going but it too was almost finished. There was a kind of run on fresh hot coffee, but that was good because it was a cold winter morning in February, and I decided to wait for it, and not just walk out without mine.

But as I stood there I noticed that the entire line, maybe seven people, was comprised of high school girls. Apparently the high school is only about two blocks from the store, so all these girls had come over to get their coffee before school. I thought for a moment about the corrupting nature of it, as I now drink about six cups a day, and it doesn’t do me a whole lot of good. This store is getting these young girls hooked on the stuff before they’re old enough to know any better, I thought, and I considered the cigarette commercials of my youth, which had gotten me to smoke for what, about ten years.

Now these were the days of the coronavirus, and you weren’t supposed to stand around breathing everyone’s air unless you were pretty sure they were ok. It hadn’t quite reached our small town to the best of my knowledge, so these girls were acting the way they usually did, giggling and telling stories about various teachers and what had happened in school earlier in the week. They were busy being teenage girls, and I was an old codger in line behind them, waiting for the coffee to be made so we could all be on our way. People had to go around us to get to the bathroom, but I was avoiding the place, just kind of watching everything idly, and listening in a little.

One of their teachers had done a climate change assignment, and one of the girls’ parents had objected and called the teacher, claiming that climate change was a hoax and they shouldn’t be teaching it in high school. As I listened to this, it raised my eyebrow a little, as last winter was the warmest we’d ever had. It seemed pretty obvious to me, what with fires all over Australia and the North Pole being 65 degrees, that there was something up with the climate. In fact, in the front of the store, when I’d come in, some guy was complaining to another about how a bug beetle, which usually froze over the winter, and had trouble coming back, was already back: it hadn’t frozen. It wasn’t cold enough. On the one hand, it was a question: was the climate really changing, or was this the teacher’s imagination? To the girl, it was a question of parental interference: her life would be easier if her parents simply stayed out of it.

Two other girls were talking about a boy: what he had said or done, how he was a little rude, but yet a little cute; you get the picture. Keep in mind I’m an old man, a grandfather, and know these girls only vaguely; of course I am invisible to them, and this is absolutely none of my business. I’m sure it’s what high school girls talk about every day, or at every opportunity. I tried hard not to pay attention, but I was amused anyway. They didn’t really know how to handle the coffee, how to find the real half-and-half, which is in the dairy cooler, instead of the squirt fake creamer that you use if you can’t find anything better. They didn’t know how to fit the lids on snugly, or use one of the sleeves. They helped each other with these things; I stayed out of it.

I didn’t want to simply interject myself into their conversation, because as I stood there I realized that they’d come as a group of six or seven, and some of them who already had their coffee were there standing and waiting for the others to finish before they’d all go back – late for school, perhaps, but late all seven of them together, with strength in numbers. Our town is small. If seven girls are all late for class, there’s not much the school can do to punish them. They’d have too much fun, all being punished together, and wouldn’t care that much about the work. They were probably the majority of whatever class they were in.

Over where I stood was near the soft-drink dispenser, up against the back wall, over by the bathrooms. A trucker was in the bathroom and another, who was wearing a Cowboys jacket, was waiting in line. A third guy, an older guy who I knew a little, who was dressed in a suit, and who lived in our town, had engaged that trucker in conversation about the weather. These two also thought the weather was very unusual. From listening, with the coronavirus and everything, you’d think the world was about to end. The stock market had just crashed. The weather was haywire. It was late February and there was still some snow, and there was an accident up the road somewhere, which I wanted to hear, because I drive a lot. All this gave me a feeling of impending doom and at the same time, great excitement.

The convenience store is small, so seven teenage girls fill it up pretty quickly. But the coffee was free, so all they had to do was walk out; they didn’t even have to wait in line, and pay, and get their change, and maybe buy a lottery ticket. Some old guy was there buying a lottery ticket anyway, and he was a farmer, or someone who lived out in the country; he had dirty pants, and rough hands from working. The girls gathered up their coffee cups, held delicately in their hands, and began the process of walking around him on their way out the door.

He had unexpectedly won something on one of his lottery tickets, and in his excitement he backed up and hit one of the girls, who then spilled her coffee, not only on her hand but also on her jacket and jeans. She was quite upset about this because, being a teenage girl, her jacket and jeans were very important to her. I could understand her distress, since probably the best thing to do would be to wash both immediately, and she was already late for school, and unable to do that, really. The others stopped or came back in to the store to gather around and gasp at the horror of what had happened. The man was sorry for making her spill it, and apologized several times, but he was still smiling as a result of winning something unexpectedly that was hard or almost impossible to win.

It was, in fact, the day we got the coronavirus in our town, and it happened in that very bathroom; it may have even been that very trucker, though we never found out, as several people were coming and going, all morning. People are coming through this store all the time, and handling doorknobs, and handling money, and spilling coffee; there is no end to things like what I saw. It was the guy in the suit, as I understand it, who picked it up somewhere. I don’t think the girls were directly involved in this, and I couldn’t help but feel, in my own grandfatherly way, that it was a rough world they were getting into, with all kinds of hazards out there. Being a minister in one of the town’s major churches, I tend to look at everyone as part of my flock; I feel the divine energy protecting them as these teenagers become adults and try to defend themselves against the cruelty of the outside world. God’s will, maybe, put me between them and the guy in the suit, though I hate to push that theory anymore; I wonder if it wasn’t just sheer luck. It wasn’t them, or me, who got the coronavirus anyway, but we were all asked about the scene in that store several times before it was all over. People repeatedly would try to place how it happened, or try to figure out how such a thing could come to our small town.

My own feeling about it is that the delicate balance and order of nature had been disturbed; now that you know I am a minister, you are probably sure that I will put God in here somewhere before it’s all over. I won’t, because I don’t want to offend your sensibility, but let’s just say I was there that day. I was there, and I actually had some time to watch. That was because it took those girls so long to get their coffee, and I probably saw as much as anyone did. It was the guy in the suit who got sick, and though it wasn’t him that died, it took quite some time before our town got back to normal again. I’m sure those teenage girls all felt a little lucky that they had passed through on that morning and lived to tell the tale. They were of no help in identifying anyone, of course, because, as teenagers, they weren’t in the habit of watching older men carefully, except in the sense that they might be dangerous. I, for example, might just as well have not been there, as far as they knew; they were so self-conscious, as they tried to figure out their plastic coffee lids, that their faces went almost flush in embarassment when the lid didn’t fit right. I was intensely aware of how difficult it is to be a teenager in this world, and try to get what you need, and still make it over to the school on time. It’s a crazy world they were growing up into, and all I could think was, if a cup of coffee will help them through it, that would be the least we could do. 3-20