Diane was a widow. Her husband Luke had died young. He was in an accident while working a government position transporting files between local government offices. His truck was struck by a drunk driver at two o’clock in the afternoon. The drunk driver survived.
Because Luke was working at the time of the accident, Diane was taken care of financially.
She received Luke’s pension and enough money to sustain herself.
At first she grieved heavily. She took a leave of absence from her job at a bookstore. It was difficult for her to handle that her husband of nine years was dead.
She would spend her days in bed, sobbing or looking at old photos of Luke. He was handsome. Tall with short, dark hair and vibrant green eyes. In high school he had been a long distance runner but once he started working full time, he wasn’t able to continue running as he would have liked. However, he never seemed to lose his slim body or his muscular legs.
In all of the photographs of Luke he was smiling. His grin was large and toothy. Diane always told people that she fell in love with Luke’s smile long before she fell in love with him.
Diane’s period of grieving has long since passed. It was twenty-three years, five months and seventeen days since the accident. She’s now sixty-one years old and has come a long way.
She no longer stays at home everyday to cry and avoid the world. When that time passed, she went back to work but she couldn’t stay at any job for a long time. She felt restless and trapped. After her fourth job, at a different bookstore, she decided that she would take time off for herself. She never went back to work. Frankly, she didn’t need to because of the government compensation.
At first she didn’t know what to do with herself. She tried convincing friends to do things with her but they all had had jobs to go to or kids to take care of. She tried reading but she was too distracted to read in public and she feared becoming an old hermit who locked themselves in their house to read all day. She tried crafts and exercise but she found herself easily getting bored with something or she found that she could only do them for short periods of time.
Diane had always been a coffee drinker. She always asked for black and then added two scoops of sugar and a splash of cream. As she prepared it she would often remark, even just to herself, that she liked her coffee like her men; natural but with a womanly touch to make it acceptable.
When discussing how she never got out of the house with a friend one Sunday, her friend suggested that she gets her coffee at a coffee house. That way she would have a change of scenery and not have to worry about brewing coffee.
Diane thought she would give the suggestion a try. She had nothing to lose and it wasn’t like it would interrupt her schedule at all. The problem was, for Diane, that there were a number of coffee shops in the city. There were the corporate chains and there were local boutiques. Diane did not know which coffee shop had a coffee she would find acceptable. She had trouble deciding which one to try first.
Her initial thought was to try a corporate chain because they must have good coffee to be able to have shops nationwide but then she thought no, stereotypes are formed about the people who drink coffee from these chains. Diane wasn’t the kind of person who accepted a stereotype very well.
So she searched for the right cup of coffee elsewhere. It took her a couple weeks to find the right brew. The first one was too bitter and the second was not strong enough. The third was decent but it took too long for her to get there. The fourth, to her amazement, did not offer a plain black coffee, only flavored blacks. The fifth was too expensive and not enough deliciousness to make it worthwhile. And so on and so forth.
Eventually Diane found that the coffee shop for her was Le Cafe and it had a decent cup of joe. It was locally owned on the corner of Glenway and Stout streets. The interior was painted a milk chocolate brown and maroon. There was a brick fireplace in back that would be lit more often than not. There were small round wooden tables with wooden chairs. Big squishy chairs were placed by the fireplace with a coffee table full of old magazines and the daily papers. Diane did not sit at either of these places; she preferred the counter by the front window where she could watch people go about their business on the cross streets.
For a while Diane would order her coffee, drink it quickly and then return home. But when she made it home she realized that she wished to go back. She had rushed to finish her coffee only to return home to the life she tried to escape at the coffee shop. She felt no better about herself than when she just stayed home.
To keep herself at the coffee shop a while longer, Diane tried reading the magazines and newspapers that were scattered about the coffee table. She quickly found that she did not care which celebrity was with which celebrity or who went to Africa to adopt a child. Daine always felt that focusing on those aspects of someone’s life was meaningless. She thought it would be amusing if someone produced a magazine where the focus was on people not considered celebrities. No one would be allowed to appear twice. That way the stories would be fresh in each issue. But, unfortunately for Diane, the world did not seem to think entertainments was the same as she thought.
Diane started to bring a notebook with her to the coffee shop. Inside she would write down what she did the previous day. She never figured out why she started to do this because each day was nearly the same as the one before it, but she did it anyway. Diane needed a way to keep herself occupied while she enjoyed her coffee.
Every once in a while, while Diane sat at the window, someone would sit down next to her and strike up a conversation. Not everyone had a story to tell nor did they have much to say at all and Diane would wonder why they were talking in the first place. She would, regardless of whom the person was and what they had to say, write down brief notes about the person and what they had talked about. Diane would then tell her friends about the more interesting people she met. They would always respond with something along the lines of, “They sound like a character, you should write a book about them.”
Diane found this odd. She never considered herself much of a writer. She enjoyed books, but hardly the process that went into creating them. Writing was a tedious and boring process that she did only to keep herself busy. The daily notes she wrote in her journal were sparse. She only needed to write brief notes to remember the entire conversation. One of her earlier entries read only, ‘man with knit tie, briefcase has a tear, many papers.’ But regardless of the sparse notes she could still recall the rust color of the elderly professor’s tie and the way the papers spewed out of his briefcase when he unlocked it with a key pulled from inside the tear. She also knew this man did not seem to enjoy his position at the local university because he had so many papers to grade. Diane had tried to change the subject from papers to anything else, but the man was adamant to continue his complaints.
For nearly twenty-three years Diane wrote her daily journal entries. Now she had a bookshelf filled with old notebooks with the pages yellowing. There were 171 notebooks. Each notebook had 70 pages and each page was filled, totaling 11,970 pages filled with journaling, jokes and doodles. Diane had filled an average of 7.4 notebooks a year and roughly a page and a half a day for twenty-three years.
At the age of 61, Diane finally decided to write the book her friends had told her to write so many times over the years. For days now she had been going through her old journals and reading about the people she met. There were so many, some of them even showed up a few times over the years but most of them had their fifteen minutes with her only once. It was difficult for Diane to pick the character that was to be the focus for her story. It was even more difficult for Diane to not spend a particularly long time remembering any one of them. If she did that, she would never get through them all. Each person she had met was different and beautiful in their own unique way to Diane. She wanted to be sure that she picked the one that was right and make sure everyone who read her book knew the beauty and quirks of this person.
As she paged through her writing and read, she would sometimes come across an entry that made her stop and think about every detail of the conversation she had; to relive it to the fullest.
On March 4 of the first year she wrote, she had written “Scotch wedding man is present in body but not fully in mind.” She remembered the man because his story was beautiful and sad at the same time.
Diane had been sipping her coffee recording her notes of the previous day. The corner of her notebook was wet because the umbrella she carried had not been covering a part of her bag. The rain had turned the city gray.
A man came and sat down at the chair one seat away from her. Diane did not look up but had she done so, she would have seen a man in his early-twenties wearing a suit and already balding. He took a sip of the coffee and then immediately pushed it away with a look of disgust on his face.
“They’re out of scotch,” he said.
“Excuse me?” asked Diane because no one else was at the window with them.
“Scotch. They says they don’t have no more. What kind of bar doesn’t have scotch? Anyway, they gave me this on the house. They said it would help,” he said motioning to the cup. “I guess they never said it’d taste like scotch.”
Diane looked at the man. There was a fair amount of stubble on his chin, as though he hadn’t shaved in a few days. The tie around his neck was loosened and the white shirt beneath it was unbuttoned a few buttons at the top. There were a few stains on the shirt. This man was scrawny and the size of his suit only emphasized it. He looked down into his hands when he talked, staring beyond their surface. Diane smelt and nearly gagged at the smell of vomit and alcohol about the man.
“What’re you drinking?” he asked.
“Coffee, black. Are you alright sir?”
“No,” he said with confidence. “I am far from alright. What day is it?”
“Thursday,” replied Diane.
“Well then…” he started, nodding towards her.
“Diane.”
“Well then Diane, I have been drinking since Saturday. I have been drunk for three days and I want some more scotch.”
Diane didn’t like to pry. She usually just let people tell her what they wanted, but she was so curious about this man that she had to ask.
“Why have you been drinking since Saturday, sir?”
“Richard,” he said thrusting his hand at her, still not looking up from his other hand. “Because I just watched my lifelong love get married. I was at the wedding. I heard their vows, I watched them kiss. I shook his hand with this,” finally looking up from his own hand and shaking it in front of him. “I gave them my best and then I went back to my wife. Why d’you think I’ve been drunk since Saturday?”
Diane wasn’t sure she understood Richard’ story, why would a man not marry the love of his life?
“Richard, do you mind me asking why you have a wife?”
“Sure, fine, you already asked so ask away. I don’t mind telling. I have a wife because I’m a coward.”
“Why are you a coward?”
“Because I never was able to say that I was in love with someone. We grew up as neighbors and were the best of friends. Then he went off and got engaged. That’s right,” responding to the look of understanding on Diane’s face, “I’m in love with my best friend and he doesn’t love me back.”
“I’m so sorry Richard.”
“Oh there’s more, Diane, and let me tell you that it isn’t fair. He asked me to be his best man. I expected it and so did everyone else. But he had no idea how much it hurt to accept. I gave him my blessing but when the priest asked if anyone had a reason that they shouldn’t be married, I wanted to shout ‘ME.’ But I didn’t because I’m a coward.”
“Richard, I still don’t understand why you got married, and to a woman at that. If you loved this man, why marry someone else? Why didn’t you shout ‘ME’?
“I gave up. He got engaged and I gave up. I started dating a girl who called me all the time the day after I found out about the engagement. I did it just for show. Maybe I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay and maybe somehow it would make the wedding easier. It didn’t and then six months later I proposed to her. We got married before he did and then moved out here. I didn’t love her then and I don’t love her now.”
Richard buried his face in his arms. A moment later his body shook from his sobs. Diane wanted to comfort him but she didn’t know how. What does someone do to help a stranger that gave up hope in being happy?
“I hate the bitch,” he erupted. “My wife. She’s too dumb to figure it out. She doesn’t see it, she never has and she never will.”
Diane didn’t know what to say.
“What time is it?” asked Richard.
Diane looked at her watch, “Its 10:47.”
Richard got up and said, “Here,” pushing the untouched cup of coffee towards Diane and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To find some scotch,” he said as he pushed open the door.
Richard could have been a great focus for Diane’s story, maybe filling the back story and telling what life is like with his wife, but Diane didn’t like that he was an easy person to beat. She kept looking.
She came across an entry in one of her journals from several years later. The entry read only, “Philosopher’s watch.”She remembered this man so well because he made her think about things differently after she spoke with him. She felt it was because of this man that she could figure things out that weren’t on the surface.
She had become a regular at the coffee shop. She was a regular in the sense that when new people were hired, part of their job training was to be acquainted with Diane.
Her hair had been slowly turning from a golden brown to gray. It had been a long time since she truly grieved for Luke; she still missed him daily but she had made peace with the fact that he was gone.
Diane was adding the sugar to her coffee when he sat down. He wore a tweed coat with patches on the elbows. His hair was white and whispy; every movement caused it to sway a little on top of his head. When he sat down, he placed a large leather-bound book next to his coffee.
“Excuse me miss, did you put that there?” he asked, motioning towards the empty packets of sugar.
“Yes, I just poured them in my coffee.”
Diane waited for some explosion from the man, telling her to clean up after herself. Every now and then someone would sit down and stick up their noses at the ‘mess’ she might have made.
“Well that clears that up. I thought we might have had an interesting predicament on our hands. Say, do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Sure,” responded Diane even though she expected him to ask her to clean up the trash. She’d dealt with the kind before. For a while she disputed the trash with them but eventually she decided that it wasn’t worth it because those people would continue to be who they wished, despite what she said.
“Alright then,” he exclaimed with some excitement. “Say you are on the beach of a deserted island. There is no indication that anyone has ever been on the island before you. As you walk down the beach, you come across a wristwatch in the sand. How do you think the wristwatch got there?”
Diane was relieved. He was asking her a riddle instead of quarreling about the trash. Diane liked riddles. “Well, I would say that someone must have dropped it there.”
“How can you know that? As far as you can tell, no one else had ever been on the island.”
“Well, how else could a watch get there?”
“Precisely my point. Since we can’t prove that anyone had ever been there before you, we must assume that it appeared in a different way. Someone once suggested to me that God could have placed it there. I then asked him to prove a God existed that could have put it there.”
Diane wondered where he was going with this. She was disappointed that it wasn’t a riddle but she was curious how the man thought it came to be there.
“You see the only logical explanation as to why the watch is there is that it has always been there. There is nothing indicating otherwise. As far as we can tell, it was placed there when the island was created. It was created with the island.”
Diane wanted to point out that a plane could have flown overhead and dropped it or that the weather could have washed away the traces of someone being on the island first, but she didn’t feel the need to argue with this man. She just finished her coffee anyway so she got up and left.
Diane decided that she couldn’t write a story about the philosopher. There certainly was not enough information about him and she couldn’t imagine him having a very interesting life. Instead she continued searching through her journals.
In an entry from only a few months ago, Diane found her favorite person in all her years of drinking coffee. The entry read, “Glenn, my American knight. Oh how I wish I could have been younger and went with him.”
Diane had recently turned 61 when Glenn sat next to her. She had aged a great deal since the death of Luke. Her hair had turned gray and was working its way towards white. She wore glasses suspended by a chain around her neck. Her body was not nearly as slim as it once had been and her face was littered with wrinkles.
Glenn was much the opposite. He was in his late thirties. His jet black hair needed a cut and his face needed a shave. Over his jeans he wore leather chaps. He had removed a black leather jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. Underneath he wore a plain white shirt. His skin was firm, weathered and tan from the sun.
When Diane first looked at him, she was taken aback. He had a beauty about him she hadn’t seen in a man since she lost her Luke. She thought of the things she might have done had she still been a younger woman.
He spoke first, “My middle name is Glenn.”
“That’s nice.”
“We’re on the corner of Glenway and Stout streets.”
“Oh, of course. I’ve never seen you before, are you from around here?”
“No ma’am, I came from the West. I’m working my way cross country.”
“I hope you aren’t hitchhiking, it’s such a dangerous business.”
“No, nothing like that. I’m taking my motorcycle from one coast to the next.”
“Well, I don’t know if a motorcycle is much safer,” said Diane.
“Trust me, ma’am. As long as you’re smart about riding, a bike is safe. My Fax has never given me any trouble.”
“Your Fax?”
“I ride a Honda Shadow. She’s my Shadow Fax.”
“Oh yeah, that’s good,” said Diane letting out a laugh. “Why are you taking your trip? Are you visiting people?”
“I come from the West, ma’am. Everything out there seems so fake and corrupted to me. It’s all about money and beauty. My ex-wife only cared about those things, it’s why I left her.The funny thing is none of it’s beautiful. I’m looking for a place where the beauty is actually beautiful.”
“Let me know if you find it, I would love to see it.”
“Will do.”
“How much stuff have you brought with you for the trip? It seems to me that there isn’t much room on a motorcycle for much of anything.”
“Oh there isn’t,” he replied. “I like it that way. I don’t need things like other people do. With a bike you are forced to pack only what you need. I brought a change of clothes, a bedroll, a knife and a lighter. Not much else is really needed.”
“Have you seen any beauty yet Glenn?”
“I’ve seen some things that I think everyone needs to see and truly take in. I saw the sun set at the Grand Canyon. I saw the sun rise over the Rockies. I saw the Mississippi raging through the country. I’ve met old folks and young kids who enjoy their lives. They are the ones who don’t have much but they don’t need much. I think I’ve already found a good deal of beauty but I am going to keep going farther before I know what beauty I want to be with for the rest of my life.”
“So you’re going to live there then? What about your parents? Won’t they want you close to home?”
“Trust me, ma’am, I cut ties with them before I left. They were as much a part of the problem with what I saw in the West. But yeah, I’m going to live wherever it seems best.” With that he drained his cup. “Well, I better get back on the road and put in some miles before dark.”
Diane couldn’t believe what she did next. She said to Glenn, “If you ever make it back here, look me up. I would love to hear where your travels took you. I would love to see this beauty.” At that, she handed a piece of paper with her name, number and address on it to Glenn.
“Will do ma’am. It was a pleasure talking to you.”
At that he grabbed his coat and walked out the door. Diane saw him cross the street and climb onto his bike. When she heard the engine roar to life, Diane felt alive like she hadn’t in a long time.
Diane decided to write about Glenn but she decided that she would only write what she knew so far. Oh sure, she’d make up details and fill in what she didn’t know but the story that she knew was already fantastic. She also decided that she would wait for Glenn to come back, if he ever did, to write the ending of the story.