Kif Kif

This morning I was in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. I teach poetry to middle school students there, to children who don't know my first name.

Before school I went to my favorite Italian bakery -- where, the first time I went, there was an old man sitting at the one lone table, drinking an espresso as he read an Italian newspaper. Funny how a place is so determined by our initial interaction with it. It works the same way with people; how much our relationship was determined by the first 30 seconds of it.

Today, as I waited in line to order a coffee and buy two boxes of lemon cookies, an older man who was in line behind me struck up a conversation with me. He wore glasses, a Yankees jacket, spoke in a thick Brooklyn accent. He told me he works nights, he took off work last night to hang his family's Christmas lights, he's got three kids (one who's got a baby on the way), he's been married twenty-three years to a good woman. He said, three times, that his wife is a good woman. "She leaves me alone," he said, "I watch my football and shut the door and drink my beer and she leaves me alone. She's a good woman."

Someone said to me recently that I need to learn to let go. She was right; I've got some hard ideas about things that could sure use softening. I thought of my friend for some reason right then -- and also, how there was something about the man in the bakery that reminded me of Morocco: his chattiness, his idea that a good woman is one who leaves him alone.

I thought of those hours riding the trains across Morocco, the prickly pear out the window while someone chatted on and on with me. How we, no matter who we are or where we're from or what language we speak, move apart and then come together again: we want separation as much as we want togetherness. That man's marriage works because his good woman leaves him alone; and yet he forges a sense of togetherness by talking with me on line. What brings us together is not so much our stories but the fact that we tell them.

I've been awfully hard on myself lately. I keep thinking of what I screwed up with this one or that. Men, I mean. I can't help but see an endless history of failure. And so I retreat.

But then there was that man today, pulling me out of myself. After he told me so much about his life, he asked me, "Are you married?"

"No," I laughed, "not yet."

It was just like the countless conversations I had in Morocco. Marriage, babies.

"Really? Pretty gal like you?"

"Nope!"

"But you've got someone special, right?"

"Yes," I lied, as if doing so could reassure him that his idea of the world is intact.

"Well you tell him to get his shit together," the man said. "I mean, what's he waiting for? Pretty girl like you? You're not going to wait around forever, right?"

"Right!"

I paid for my cookies and the coffee. We said "Merry Christmas" to each other. When I walked outside, I half-expected to be walking along the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco -- taking the long way from the train station to my house, to that little place I called my breathing sac. There, too, I wrote about solitude.