Observations from a coffee shop table for one

At the next table, two middle-age women were talking about their husbands. One wore short hair and an athletic headband. The other wore long, dark hair with glasses perched on the top of her head. They were talking about how their husbands don’t like to sleep next to them anymore, how they stay on their separate sides of the bed.

“It’s like the great barrier reef!”

And they laughed, like this was normal, like it was OK. Laughing made it seem OK.

The dark-haired one said, “I’m not a jealous person, but he spends a lot of time with them. They’re in their ‘30s, you know.” And her friend nodded understandingly.

Then an elderly man shuffled in with an even-more-elderly woman.

“Do you want to sit in the sun or in the shade?” he asked.

The woman chose the sun, where the January light filtered through the horizontal blinds.

“Here, I’ll go get you something, Mama,” the man said. He walked to the counter. He came back with a croissant and a blueberry Danish. The woman took the plain one.

“Here, this is the one you like,” he said as he handed her a cup. He kept repeating, this is the one you like, this is your drink. It’s vanilla chai. She finally seemed to understand.

He raised his cup of mocha and tapped the rim of her to-go lid. “Here’s to us,” he said. “Here’s to your new…” But I couldn’t catch what was new.

The middle-aged women were still talking. The athletic one said, “You should be taking care of yourself, body, mind and soul.”

The dark-haired one nodded. “We have some things we’re working out. They’re not deal breakers,” she said, in a rising voice that suggested maybe she didn’t believe herself.

The man was talking more loudly. “This was my surprise for you,” he said, gesturing to the pastries. “All along, I wanted to stop here after.” It sounded like they’d just left a series of doctor’s appointments.

The woman smiled faintly and nodded.

“You seem to be hearing better,” he said.

She fussed with her napkin and the lid of her drink.

“You don’t need to hurry, Barbara. We have time.”

We have time.  

It seemed to hang in the air, echoing inaudibly.

I looked up in the pause and happened to make eye contact for a split second with a child across the room — a little girl sitting on her mother’s lap, a little girl wearing pink.

That’s when the interwoven, overheard conversations became overpowering. The voice of every generation seemed to be reverberating through the coffee shop on this Friday morning.

It’s amazing how life changes. It’s scary and beautiful, the way the stages fade in and out as time passes. Children and husbands and doctor’s appointments and new things.

We have time.

We have time for coffee.

We have time to fix our marriages.

We have time to grow up.

Sometimes time is all we have, but often it’s what makes all the difference.