Instead Of Funny

Around two today I walked out into the rain for another cup of coffee. The drops had just begun to spatter across the city, pushed by a herky-jerk wind, and even though it was cold, the air had that scent of new rain on dusty concrete, a sensation I count among the most pleasant confirmations that I am still alive. The beautiful girl up in the Mud truck on Cooper Square didn't hear my order the first time I shouted it over the Led Zepplin song sandblasting its way into the eardrums of passersby. It was windy out too, as I said, and the rain was finding its way into the hole cut in the side of the truck. I worried about the electric space heater I saw in the back, and about what would happen to the graceful coffee girl if it got wet. She had arched her body out of the way of the raindrops so that just her face was in danger of becoming wet. Maybe this awkward angle and the wet wind that inspired it explain why she didn't hear me, or maybe it was because my voice faltered when I ordered the two small coffees with milk, one for me and one for my friend back in the office. I become shy when this pale-faced girl or the dark haired one look down at me from their perches in the truck, all business, wanting to know what I want and wanting to know it fast, and my voice sometimes betrays me, losing consonants in my throat, shifting pitch unnecessarily mid-word. And I get the feeling that anything that slows the pace is, if not exactly the enemy, an obstacle on the quest toward proper coffee distribution. But today, when she asked me to repeat my order, she smiled for a moment and offered a benevolent pause before turning back to her frantic pouring and passing. I paid, stuffed a dollar in the tip mug, making a point to meet her eye--she said Hey, thanks!--and then turned to head back down Lafayette. Above and beyond me the stone and iron edifices, many of them once the homes of the richest New York families, cascaded off toward the darkening sky, tumbling into one another in that ballet of geometry that you can only ever see when you manage to forget that it is always all around you here.