To One Who Defies Industry Standard

8”x11” paper. King size sheets. 60 watt light bulbs. One pound of spaghetti.

I didn’t even realize how much I relied on these standards until I was looking for a small table to fit by the new couch. Industry standards have all end tables at 26” high. I want the table to fit just under the roll of the arm. Twenty-two inches

I spend the afternoon at Pier One and World Market with my tiny measuring tape, looking at all the tables. I should have caught on more quickly, but the shapes and colors must confuse my sense of height, so I keep measure each one. 26. 26. 26.

Jesus Christ! No one, NO ONE??, needs a table that’s 22-inches tall? I am the only person that wants the end table to tuck under the arm instead of flush with the top?

I enjoy being a rebel, but this is too much.

How does it happen? Do all the makers of couches and end tables have a conference? Do they do it at the same time that mattress makers do? Do they meet at the same hotel and mingle at the bar, trading stories of customers who want a 22-inch high table? “Can you believe it?! Sure! We can do that...for another thousand dollars!!!” The laughter spills out into the lobby. Drunk, they all agree, sign a napkin stating, that from now on, King Size will add a ¼ inch to the length. They'll make millions

There must be one, right? One sales rep who doesn’t drink and who leaves the party early to phone home goodnight to the kids. The one who doesn’t order an appetizer at dinner. The rep with the ironed shirts. The one with a notebook who sits at the front of all the conference presentations. Sometimes the only one at the presentation. That one. Sitting there, thinking, “But what if we just…” and “We could do so much more if we only…”

I’m counting on you. Go ahead: in front of everyone, in the middle of the presentation on new fabrics for a new century, raise your hand and ask the question: Why NOT lower the tables?

To The Cricket on the Ceiling

Your friends are outside. They are having a cricket fest in the backyard. It’s the end of summer and the cooler air is exhilarating. I don’t know what crickets get drunk on, but there seems to be an open bar tonight.

 

And here you are, staked out in the edge where the wall meets the ceiling. You haven’t moved for hours and unlike most crickets that find themselves inside, you are silent. 

You are a character in a Samuel Beckett play. You are the third stanza of a Bob Dylan song. You are the green in a Frida Khalo painting. You’re the parenthesis in a Ruth Bader Ginsburg opinion. You’re the manufactured fear in a Halloween fun house. The remaining grease on a rusted bike chain. You’re Manolo Blahnik pumps on white carpet. You’re the hunger right before dinner that makes the short ribs delicious.

 

Here, you are all of these. In our house, alone, you can live out the needs of an introverted cricket, the wild fantasies you prefer to the strange dances they are performing outside. It’s quiet. You are not just a cricket, and I am not just the woman who sits in the room with you.

To My Email

In 1996, I made a pact with a friend: if we agree to email each other, we must still write letters that we fold, stuff into envelopes, seal, add a stamp and drop in an actual mailbox. The letter would show up 3 or 4 days later in the other person’s mailbox next to the gas bill. Three weeks later, there’s a reply. We agreed to keep the paper letters coming.

 

We never wrote another one.

Before email, any day could bring a letter. Gamaw writes to tell me the azaleas bloomed. Robert signs everything “Moon Man.” Brian sends a poem. My sister in Germany writes on thin, light blue airmail paper. The way she writes her numbers, you would think she grew up European. My niece is starting 4th grade. She walks the hills to school. Any day, I would grab the mail and there could be a letter. Any day could get better.

Sometimes I would write a letter for days. I had stationary; eventually, I moved to unlined so I could get more in. I wrote front and back. Over the years, my handwriting got smaller, sharper, less bubbly. Serious.

Now, I’m only interested in mail around my birthday.

Don’t mourn this. Don’t mourn the death of the handwritten letter unless you miss paintings on cave walls. Don’t bemoan it unless you prefer to live your life at a speed that doesn’t exist anymore. Don’t shake your hands in the air with a what-is-this-world-coming-to expression unless you prefer your home mailbox stuffed with ads for credit cards and oil changes and catalogues the size of phone books from Sears.

As much as I loved those letters--and I have saved many of them--I cannot say we are worse for not having them. It’s a loss, to be sure. We’ve lost so much. Traveling across country by train. Phone booths. Party lines. Hand grinders for coffee beans and stove top percolators. Ice boxes.

We can’t look back. We can’t wish for the way things were. We can’t live our old lives again. We have all moved on. We know it’s better. It’s progress.

The kids are sure, anyway.

To “Making” The Workshop Packet

As a poetry writing student, almost every semester of my undergraduate and graduate career, one question came up once a week: “Did you make the packet?”

Every week we had to submit poems to the professor, usually three, but Jerome Rothenberg was a sadist and wanted five. The following week, we would be given photocopies of the poems the professor thought worthy of discussion. This would be our material for the week’s workshop.

Making the packet was big. No one was promised a spot. This was before the “everyone gets a ribbon” philosophy took hold. Professors understood you would learn from reading and critiquing as well as from writing, so they didn’t fuss much with democracy or equal time. They sat at their desks on Friday afternoons, reading what must have seem like a mess of bad writing. Perhaps the question was never what to leave out, but rather what, if anything, to include.

I wrote a poem once about sacrificing vegetables, my vegetarian ethos carried to an extreme. I imagine the reading of that was followed by a very stiff drink. It did not make the packet.

Making the packet was good, but making the front of the packet was best. The tone-setter. The first impression. The one everyone sees when they pick up the packet to work on it. This poem. This title. This font. All the artistic choices seen over and over again.

Equally good was the last poem. This would be the last poem discussed that week, the one that would reverberate through the weekend. The final note. The dessert. The last word.

But any place in the packet was better than none. One week goes by. That happens. Two weeks. That hurts. Three weeks. The professor hates me. Four. I should have majored in math.

 

After a particularly long stretch of not showing up in the packet, I go to Milt’s office. It smells like books and leather. I want to know what what I can do, why I’m not making the packet. This is my first semester as a transfer student at this school and my southern, outsider ways have not yet been burnished.

“Do you know the Bronx?” he says, landing heavy on the “x”. No, I don’t. “My mother lives in the Bronx,” he says, “Lived, I mean. She lived in the Bronx.” I’d been to the city, but it all looked the same to me. I didn’t know the Bronx from Staten Island.

We talk for an hour and never once talk about my poems. He doesn’t care if I make the packet. He doesn’t care if there is a packet. He walks me through the Bronx right there in his office and I get to know his mother. He moves his hands through the air as if to point out her apartment over there, the deli over here. He sits forward and puts his elbows on the desk, “Do you see? See what I mean?”

I don’t remember if I ever make the packet in his class again. 

But I asked the question of every poem, “Do you see? See what I mean?”

To The Mis-seeing of Things Both Near and Far

I have learned to wait several seconds before I greet someone; I’ve waved at many strangers with great enthusiasm. I hope I made their day a little brighter.

At a bar once, I handed the door man the $10 cover charge and he looked at me and back down at my hand. And back at me. I was handing him a maxi pad, pressing it into his palm.

I’ve mistaken a person for a horse--twice.

I’ve mis-seen a lot, but I never invested in them.

The dress fits perfectly, brown with pink abstract flowers. At $12 on clearance, it’s a steal. She has mauve shoes to match. The flowers aren’t frilly, no 1980’s cabbage roses. They are sleek, sharp, artistic flowers.

At home, she’s hanging it in the closet when her daughter runs in the room. She takes one look at the dress and says, “Kittens!” She looks again and they call come into focus. A cat-print dress.

Source: http://www.catster.com/cat-chic/ann-taylor-loft-kitten-dress

 She loves animals. But not enough to wear on a dress. Not pink and mauve kittens. Not when they should be flowers. She’s a professional. She counsels patients in a nursing home. She holds their sons’ and daughters’ hands and speaks in low tones. She’s not kitten dress.

 

Still, she wears it. She tells herself they are flowers. When she passes by the mirror in the women’s room, she doesn’t focus, so in the blur, they are what she wants them to be. Pink little mistaken kitten flowers.

I take it as a personal challenge that when the day comes I mistake dogs for diamonds or birds for paislies, I will buy it. I’ll wear it the way she does. And tell everyone to lighten the fuck up.

To Assessment Reports

Explain what your students will know when they are finished with your program.

They will know that communication is context-specific and highly variable. I hope to God they have finally figured out there is really no such thing as “proper English” and that grammar rules depend a great deal on what you want to mean and not what words you put on the page. They will have refined arguments with an understanding of their audience, their credibility, and their evidence. They will take risks with their writing and are willing to fail. They will learn to ask questions and they will learn to seek answers. They will wrestle with the indignities of the large and unwieldy, and they will orchestrate the nuances of the particulars. They sure as hell better have a sense of humor.

 Explain how you will measure these outcomes.

We have a radical process called “writing” in which students work to express their ideas. Students will be challenged in several different ways--Socratic Method, tests of recall and critical thinking, impromptu debates, personal reflection, political discourse--to refine their thinking until either they have exhausted all possibilities or the paper is due. We then, as part of the radical process, read the papers. We evaluate according to criteria which, as a whole, are greater than the sum of the parts. Measuring this is not like baking a cake. Or having them bake a cake. It is about trying to get them to envision a cake before they have seen a cake. It’s about trying to understand what they mean when they say “cake,” and if they have revolutionized the idea of cake enough to have created something new or if they have completely misunderstood the concept of cake and we are all given sandwiches. Delicious as they may be, they are not cake. Therefore, delicious cannot be a measurement criteria. If you eat cake and sandwiches, this is clear.

Explain what you will do with this data.

We will give it to you. I know we are supposed to use it to improve the program, but honestly, by then, it’s too late. Our students email on Friday and say they don’t understand the assignment. We email back and ask them to be more specific. They say they think they are doing it wrong. We say wrong is fine. Wrong is normal. You can’t learn if you don’t do it wrong, so go ahead and do it wrong and then you will also know what you’re doing right. We undo years and years of standardized testing and regurgitation.

If we waited for a year to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, we wouldn’t actually be teaching. We would not be sitting with the student who doesn’t understand today what a comma splice is, pointing it out again and again. We would slap a grade on a paper and let it go. We would never reward the risk.

Because you ask me to, I will apply numbers to all of the above. 1-5. Fives accept each and every challenge with a hunger and humor we admire. Threes get the job done. Ones need to refocus, early and often.

What do you conclude from this data?

We conclude it tells us something, but not the something you want us to tell you. You want to know if they will be successful, qualified, professional. Yes. But that’s beside the point.

We conclude our students are human beings and struggle with the complexities of maintaining an identity when chaos and flux undermine the structures of their day. We know the data tell us they are thinking and that for some, what they are thinking is so contrary to what they have always believed, they cannot say it. We believe sometimes quiet is best. We believe the spaces between the data points carry the most relevant information.

To “Calculatus Eliminatus”

“The way to find a certain something is to find out where it’s not.”

 

I lose the car keys in my office. Small place, should be easy to find. Check the desk drawers. Nothing. Check my briefcase. Nope. Look in the pockets to my jacket. Look underneath the chair. Behind the door. Double check my purse. File cabinet. Garbage can. Maybe I left them by the coffepot. Maybe by my mailbox? The copier? Did I stop in the restroom? At the Starbucks?

************************************************************************************************************

I lose a dvd of home movies. The silent super 8’s of us in the 60’s and 70’s. We take turns running up to the camera, smiling. I’m in an infant sister and my big sister wants me to look here, now there, and she pushes my face in any direction she wants. My parents keep filming. Nana at Christmas. She’s adjusting my brother’s collar. My son’s life is is radically different. No one is pushing his face. His grandmothers kind of like it when he’s messy. I want to show him the movies. It’s lost on him.

************************************************************************************************************

On a train, headed to Prague, I dreamed REM singing “Losing My Religion.” In the dream, my friend, an artist, is writing frantically and throwing the sheets of paper at me faster than I can read them. What do I do with all this? Four years earlier, I dreamed I was about to die, falling off a cliff, and I wanted to pray and then remembered I didn’t believe in God. What do I do? The paper falls around me. I fall without an answer. I see nothing clearly in either dream.

************************************************************************************************************

My neighbor walks over and I comment he’s all dressed up. He’s wearing blue jeans with a belt and his red button-down shirt is tucked in, though he does allow himself house slippers. He says today is his birthday. 82. He has lost two daughters and one great grandson. His wife calls him back inside; Bill is on the phone. “Oh, honey,” he says to me, “I gotta get this,” and he hugs me before he goes back in. He has buried two daughters and one great grandson. I wonder if I would survive it. He wonders how he has.

To Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

In elementary school, in a line on the dryer as we head out the door, our brown lunch bags lined up with our initials: T, R, K, M, S. We’d grab one as we head out the door.

I don’t know how my parents did it, and frankly, I don’t want to. I cannot imagine raising five children, even if we were all awesome and easy, which we weren’t.

I was a picky eater. Some nights I would come to the dinner table and just--what?--sigh? I remember thinking it was all just inedible. The beans too overcooked, the hamburgers too pink, the potatoes too smooth or too lumpy. Nights like this, Mom would make me an ice cream shake with a raw egg blended in and call it a day.

So, grabbing our lunch bags was a frightening because I may get the wrong one and that would be unbearable. I may be forced to see my brother’s Kraft Ham sandwich or my sister's peanut butter and jelly sandwich with strawberry (with seeds and clumps of berries--torture!) jam instead of grape jelly.

You’d think a kid would make the best of it, just eat the sandwich and go to recess. I wish I could explain how it felt to see the strawberry jelly ooze out the side of the bread or to see the edges of the ham poke out between the crust. Though today, I consider myself adventurous and want to believe I could sit at any table and eat any thing, back then it was a culinary minefield.

Peanut butter (crunchy) and jelly (no seeds) sustained me, year in and year out. Through middle school when I wore (literally) rose colored glasses that covered ¾ of my face and believed it was cool. Through high school when I wanted to be so much more than some kid in a seat in a school in Dallas.

Even now. 48 years old and I still pack peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When I cannot imagine how I will get through the day, but I know I will, I pack one. When I have slept recklessly and madly the night before, I pack one. When I worry, I pack one.

And I have been known to take them into meetings with chair persons and deans. I used to apologize, but I don’t anymore. This is my lunch. Peanut butter and jelly. And I’m eating it now. In this meeting. And you better not say thing one about it.

To Home Improvements

Some projects we choose: painting a room, adding a deck, recessed lighting in the living room ceiling. We measure the spaces and watch YouTube videos of young people with tool belts and an extraordinary amount of drywalling skills for their age.

We travel up and down the aisles of Home Depot pushing a shopping cart large enough for a baby elephant. We throw in all the extras we didn’t consider and/or didn’t know existed. Special tapes and shockingly long nails. Nail guns. Four kinds of saws with 16 different kinds of blades. Deck paint. Wall paint. Brick paint. Supplies for stripping, tearing down, demolishing and everything to build it back up. 

We don’t think of the projects as fun, really, but we know it will be worth it. An investment.

Other projects are gifted to us by thunderstorms and ice jams. We never heard the slow silent drip from the second floor bathroom; we never noticed the mold around the inside of the window. When the dog stood for three days by the fireplace trying to tell us about the bats, we ignored him. Now the project is urgent and expensive. It’s the middle of winter when no one wants to consider demolition and construction. The kitchen ceiling droops lower, new cracks every day.

We have been saving for a car, a vacation, college, retirement, but today we will have to write a check or take out a loan for the $12,000 new roof. We were going to surprise the kids next year with a trip to the Grand Canyon, but instead we will build fires and toast marshmallows in the new rodent-free fireplace.

To The Dog Outside Barking at 2:37, 2:43, 2:52 and 3:05 in the Morning

This is the last morning of what has been a very stressful week at work. Reports are due and then they have to be read. And then interpreted. And then forwarded to the People Who Will Have Questions. There’s a leak in my office I’m trying to ignore, but dark circle widening on the carpet is getting closer to my desk. My students are beginning to understand college is for real and when I wake up at 5:00, my inbox always has a few frantic emails about the assignment due in class today. They will not wake up in time to read my reply. I consider using Twitter to communicate with them. Twitter is stressful.

 

All these worries go to bed with me and though we all fall asleep, we wake each other up. One kicks and the other pulls the sheet off the bed. One is too hot and the other is too cold. One snores. One is having bad dreams and talking out loud. Usually, I just get up. We all calm down when we start working.

But this morning, we have managed to sleep peacefully. I’m drifting through a dream that has no narrative, but a house from my childhood I recognize. A well-lit kitchen. A glass sugar server with a metal lid hinged in the center. As it is becoming more and more clear, I hear you barking. And that barking becomes louder, though not urgent.

Bark. [Silence.] Barkbark. [Silence.] Bark. [Silence] Barkbarkbark. [Silence.]
 

I wake up. You aren’t part of my dreamscape, but a real dog that has been left outside at this unholy hour and needs desperately to go back in the house, to the blanket in the corner of the room, to the bowl of fresh water, to the crumbs the boy leaves on the stairs as he goes to his room.

Your owner has forgotten about you and you have waited all night by the door. Finally, you have to say something but you are trying not to bother the neighborhood. You are barking as small and infrequently as caninely possible while still trying to get what you need. Yes, you I love.

Your owner, on the other hand, needs to understand what he has robbed from me. This first complete sleep cycle in weeks. The possibility of going to work without circles under my eyes. A clear head, if only for a day. The reassurance that a full night of sleep really is possible. That bowl of sugar.

That was my grandmother’s kitchen. She was in the next room. We would have had a cup of coffee. Maybe she would have held my hand. I haven’t seen her in years. We were so close.

To Mr. K. 6th Grade, Christ The King School

"

Source: http://www.fameimages.com/gary-sandy

In 6th grade, Noelle and I had it in for Mr. K.. As an adult, I don’t know why, but as a 6th grader, it was perfectly clear: he walked around like Andy on WKRP and seemed like an adult who wanted to be “cool,” which is the worst way to be cool. Kids can smell that. 

 

We would imitate him, comb our hands through our hair the way he would, flipping his feathered layers with a small tick of his neck. He wore jeans with a jacket and tie. And cowboy boots. He tried to teach us math, but the second he would turn towards the blackboard to write a problem, we’d laugh, so that he would have to turn back around quickly, “WHAT is so funny?!?”

After lunch, the teachers would all be watching the kids on the playground and we would sneak off to the pay phone by the community building. We looked up his address in the phonebook--D. Kerlick. We would call 1-800 numbers and COD order him Ronco’s Mr. Microphone and K-Tel’s “Disco Fire” collection. Ginsu knives and every TimeLife series they had. We got him good, we thought.

We imagined day after day, the packages arriving at his tiny apartment. He would yell at the mail carrier, “But I didn’t order these!!” We thought he would be chest deep in Buttoneers and Record Vacuums, pacing across the sculptured carpet, flipping his hair. “Damn kids!” All the while, we knew he would never trace it back to us. And finally, his apartment would be so stuffed and he would hate us so much, he would not come back to school.

But he kept showing up. He came back the day after we put glue all over his chair. After he caught us mocking him in the gym. He showed up every day.

At the end of the year, he quit. We thought we did the world a public service. In our magical thinking, we made adults weep and quit their jobs. We thought teachers better watch themselves.

Maybe.

Maybe he hated us enough to never come back. Maybe we were so bad that he gave up teaching altogether.

At 12, decisions seemed to rest on one thing at a time, but there was a math he couldn’t teach us, problems too complicated to explain. We thought he was stupid, and what could he do but shake his head? Damn kids.

To The Checkout Clerk at Walgreens Who Decided Not to Be Polite to the Asshole Customer

It’s Saturday and it’s raining. Only it just started and people weren’t ready for it. Customers dash into the store from the parking lot and give a little shake as they take a deep breath. They look up a bit wide-eyed. “Love Hurts” is playing on the store speakers.

 

Typically, all Walgreens stores are equally busy no matter the hour. The line for checkout should never be more than 4 people long. Maybe 5 if someone is buying Bud Light and one of the checkers is 17.

Tonight the line is 3 people long, but the guy in front of me is already angry enough to count as 2. You open up another register and say, “I can help the next person over here.”

The southern in me waits for Angry Guy to move over to the open register. He doesn’t. “Sir?” I say. Nothing. I have to actually walk in front of him and make eye contact, “Do you want to check out here?” I say, pointing to register 2.

“Yes I would!” he says in a way that implies he has been waiting for hours. He has bags from other stores in his hands.

“But I need a pack of Kools,” he says, looking at you suspiciously. Like maybe you won’t sell them. Like maybe his whole life he has asked for something as simple as a small pack of cigarettes and no one, NO ONE, ever gets them for him. 

You walk around the counter and come back with cigarettes.

 

He says to you in a slow, low voice, “Now, honey, I don’t know in what world ‘Camel’ sounds like ‘Kool,’ but I want Kools. Small blue box. BLUE BOX.”

He scowls, shakes his finger.

No amount of shit a person grew up with or crap that person has gone through in life, literally no amount of it, grants the right to be an asshole to strangers. No amount of years lived or times cheated on equal a free ticket on the Rude Bus that crashes through the windows of a stranger’s day when she is just trying to do her goddamn job.

You don’t apologize. Of course, you go back to the cigarette rack and yank a BLUE BOX off the shelf. You ring it up with his Coke and pills and don’t look at him. “$11.74” Normally, I can’t read minds, but clearly you are screaming, “Fuck you!” 

You maintained more composure than most could. Maybe more than you should have. Don’t second guess this. Tonight at dinner, I toast you, Walgreens Woman. Do not, do not ever, take that shit.

To Sayings That Never Caught On

If it ain’t broke, swim.

 

It is what is, monkeys fly.

Birds of a feather make good cheese.

Go big or think twice.

Actions speak louder than nonspeakers.

Stupid is as stupid thoughts.

Think hard, lose soft

A dancing cat steams the milk.

One voice, many hands.

A dream of stars never loses.

You can’t swim backwards if you don’t have a map.

Freedom for all, dinner for lunch.

If it’s Tuesday, this must be Hamlet.

Shame on me once, joke’s on you. Shame me twice…joke’s on you.

The ripest lemons have the sourest milk.

Sing like nobody’s looking, look like nobody’s singing

Listen with your heart, dream with your face.

Love hard and empty your basket.

A laughing dog is no blessing.

Poor at heart, rich at wise.

Last one standing smells the rose.

A mouse in the night needs no friend.

A song in your heart bugs people not singing.

Don’t leave memories unweaned.

Spray your dreams like fireworks.

The sharper your pencil, the duller your knife.

A lie built on sticks is a truth dressed in leather.

The bigger the truth, the smaller its pants.

A big brain buries small dreams.

The best lessons are those without wings.

The higher you fly, the lower the sunset.

A thing unsaid empties no vessels.

To The Last Time I Held Rainer

We were lucky. We knew exactly when he would die, and we would be there. We would hold him on our lap and the doctor sat with us and the nurse turned off all the machines and took out the ventilator tube. 

We were lucky because we got tell him everything we hoped he’d ever hear. Our voices were the last voices he heard. The lights were dim, and for the first time in his life, it was like being in just a room, a living room.

We were lucky because it’s rare to know when the person you love most in the whole world is going to die.

A girl, 4, wanders off while the family is camping. They are cleaning up after lunch and have all misunderstood who is watch Annie.

The high school kids are happy summer is finally here. This is the last summer before they all leave for college. They have the music up. They hit the train tracks too hard.

She said goodnight to her dad and took her book off the couch on the way to bed. Her dad has a massive heart attack that night.

She was spending the night away. Her mom shot herself while her dad was fixing her breakfast.

We were lucky.

But I didn’t get it. The distance--emotional, spiritual, logical--between my head and my heart was unbridgeable. We left the hospital, and I hate to say I felt relief, but I did. I actually thought that whatever that nightmare was, it was over. And now when can get on with our lives. Together.

I could not yet conceive that, even though he had just died, he wasn’t coming home. All the clothes we had would go unworn. We wouldn’t need the crib. The car seat. I couldn’t even think it, imagine it. Survive it. I told someone on the phone the night he died, “We should all be so lucky to die that way.” And I fully expected that in the morning, we would go back to the hospital and find him fine, wrapped in the standard nursery blanket. Like it was somehow a misunderstanding.

The next morning, when I start to get dressed and realize that there is nothing to get dressed for, I want to take it all back. I said I was relieved, but I wasn’t. I thought it was quiet, but I can’t stop hearing the sound of her turning off the machine. I want to undo my entire life that has led to this morning. I said we should all get to die like that. 

But we shouldn’t.

To the Person Who Stole $37 Out of My Purse When I Left It in the Coffee Shop

Pro: You left the purse hanging neatly on the back of the chair exactly where I left it.

 

Con: You stole my cash.

Pro: Except the change!

Con: You could have taken the pennies!

Pro: You did not take my ID or credit cards.

Con: That was a really bad picture on my driver’s license

Pro: I hope you needed the money.

Con: You may have needed it.

Pro: I hope you bought some coffee. A sandwich.

Pro: A lesson in non-attachment

Pro: I’m sorry I broke that $20 earlier. You would have had an easy $40

Pro: You make careful choices.

Pro: Our world is as small as this cafe.

Pro: I can get more cash.