People

I love it that I’m working with people so much now. My job at Starbucks is constant interaction. Its stretching at times…like when I get in the mood where I am focused on what I am doing and don’t want to be disturbed, or when I am frustrated and don’t want to smile at a customer. There are people who are looking for problems and use unsuspecting baristas as their guinea pigs. I think these people work in buildings all day and are looking for drama anywhere they can find it. People make me madder than anything. I never got that frustrated in my cubicle at the bank.
I turned to my manager Brandy today, as I watched Elizabeth (grande hazelnut no foam latte) leave the store and get into a bright yellow mini cooper, that I wish I knew everyone’s story. She is a beautiful middle-aged woman with grey hair and a soft voice. I love it that she drives a canary yellow mini cooper. I wish I knew what she does everyday after she walks out with her drink. What is her job? Is she married? Does she have grown children? Grandkids? Is she from here? What twists and turns has her life taken to get her here?
A little later a blonde woman is getting out of her SUV and my fellow barista Josh comments that this woman was a former neighbor of his. He said she has a young son, an artificial leg and used to walk around her house naked without regard for open windows. Sure enough she grabbed her son from the back and limped to the door.
On my second break today I was looking forward to the ten minutes I had to sit outside and read this new book I am enjoying immensely. A little black man with a baseball hat that I recognize as a regular customer (short coffee, marble pound cake) is sitting at the next table and begins to ask me questions. There is a battle that goes on in me when this happens. I feel my natural inclination to answer quickly, make it obvious that I want my time, but be friendly enough so as not to appear snobby. There is another part of me that knows that other people is where the life is. If I don’t allow others into my life, how can I complain about loneliness?
I choose to engage in conversation with Cheeshah (no idea how to spell his name.) Cheeshah is from Ethiopia and has lived here for four years. I recognize his English abilities are far superior to four years in America. He said he learned English in Ethiopia and that anyone with a high school or college degree there learns it. He had studied Political Science and Economics and spent fifteen years being a television journalist. This was before he spent five years in Kenya as a refugee.
Now he lives here with his family and cannot find a job. Before he was a television news reporter he worked as an operator of television equipment. He says that there are no jobs available like that here. He seems restless to find something to do, some way to prove he is educated and worthy of contributing to something.
I ask if he has refugee friends that were placed here too. He then explains that his best friend was the one who was killed down the street last week. I had not heard of it. I looked it up and his name was Abate Z. Hailu, he owned a Fina down the street and was shot during a robbery. Cheeshah said he was very educated and wealthy. “He was my best friend,” he kept saying.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I listened to this little man talk. I wondered what in the world he has seen in his life. How a man like his friend can escape war in Ethiopia only to get gunned down in America. I wondered how hard his parents worked and how much they sacrificed to make sure that Cheeshah was educated in their poor country, for him to end up bursting with talent in a place where people like him are so easily overlooked. I tried to imagine him reporting news in Ethiopia, walking down the street in his suit, microphone in hand as the camera followed him, viewers hanging on every word as he articulately gave the latest on some of the gravest situations our modern world has ever seen.
When my break timer went off, he was talking about a book he has started about political science. I was hoping he was going to say it was his own biography. He asked if I would mind editing his rough draft, to make it sound more American. I would be honored.
So, yeah, I guess there is more life in people than in burying my head in some book.