MoodyTunes

I like making my own coffee at home. I like making my own coffee at home because I probably can’t make it to a coffee shop without getting a headache, but I also enjoy the process: grinding beans, listening to water burble around, settling into my online newspaper-reading position and, overall, waking up in the privacy of my own apartment.

Once or twice a semester I’ll treat myself to a flavored coffee from a coffee shop nearby. Usually, I get a vanilla latte. Not the biggest one and not the smallest one.

Yesterday I thought this is a fine day for Latte Time! and proceeded to my local latte dispensary. I noticed another patron in a typically Nashvillian dark plaid shirt with pearl buttons. He had a backpack that a lot of college students seem to have, one from a camping outfitter or sporting goods manufacturer, and he also wore a hat that struck me as one I’d never wear, and also as a hat that, if a friend picked it up in a store and said “How ’bout this?”, I’d laugh at and disparage. A trendy hat, something a person might wear to make a statement. A statement like, “Hey, I’m trendy.”

Coffee soon in hand, I walked out of the shop and on to campus. I took a random route because when I was in high school I lived on an Army base and was bombarded with Armed Forces Television Network “commercials” that emphasized tactics like varying your routes of travel. Why? To confuse spies, of course. The paths on campus are indirect and winding enough to cause a fair amount of confusion anyway, but I jumbled up my route to be safe.

And what should I discover as I approach an intersection of paths in the middle of campus about five minutes later? The hat guy from the coffee shop approaching from my right. It was instantly apparent that if we both continued walking at the same speed we’d collide in a mess of latte, expensive hats, whatever triple- or quadruple-combination-name drink he was holding, and a fair amount of private school college student and/or faculty angst.

Do you ever hear stories about how people meet unexpectedly, through random chance, and it’s a life-changing thing? Those stories where a person or couple sits there and goes on and on about What if this? or What if that?, as if a tiny little moment like a stop sign or a loose shoelace or a bug on the neck or a mix-up of an order could have delayed what turned out to be an incredibly important meeting?

Well, this was kind of like that except not at all. I slowed down and the guy walked past and we didn’t collide.

Then, as I thought about all the things that could have kept us from meeting at that exact intersection at that exact second, I thought Uh oh, that’s got to be more than just coincidence! and worried that I wasn’t supposed to slow down and dodge Hat Guy. Maybe I was supposed to smash into him, or at least say, “Hey, coffee buddy!”

Now I’ll never know. Except maybe I will, if I go back to that coffee shop tomorrow morning, or next Tuesday morning, and order the same thing at the same time and look out for a guy wearing clothes I don’t like and then follow him and trip him at the intersection of paths and shout, “This is what we were supposed to do last week! What were you going to tell me?! I’m ready now, my eyes have been opened and we shall now have one of those moments we’ll tell our friends and family about for years and years and…”

Noooooooooo. I think I’ll just stick to making my own coffee. This is why I shouldn’t go out on my own early in the morning without proper preparation.