Baristas & Best Friends

I am nearly finished reading this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for Literature, Olive Kitteridge. The book is brilliant – one the most poignant and affecting novels I have read in some time. Essentially, the piece is a collection of short stories, all set in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Olive Kitteridge is connected to each story in some way, although she is no way the protagonist in every story and often has minor involvement.

While reading a story about Olive’s son’s wedding, one quote immediately jumped off the page.

“Loneliness can kill people – in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’ Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: the waitress at Dunkin Donuts’ who knows how you like your coffee.”

I love that quote – this idea has been on my mind for some time now. Each and every morning before work, I go to my neighborhood Starbucks and read for a half-hour or so. After a few months of habitual visits, the girls who work the morning shift have come to know me and my drink.

The girls will see me walking on the street through the window and will more often than not have my iced vanilla coffee with soymilk ready before I’ve even entered the store – let alone the register! It’s a quick moment, nothing more than a few words of conversation between us, but the Starbucks girls are just as important to me as any of closest friends.

With just a few words, they have the ability to make my day. This morning for example, one chased me down to make sure I’d received my receipt – today starts the summer tradition of $2 grande beverages after 2 p.m. with your morning’s receipt. This tiny gesture of human kindness is enough to lift my spirits for the rest of the day, and is enough to prove that I am not alone.

Olive Kitteridge understood that small and simple connections with others are essential to make us feel human. I believe that people are fundamentally good; that we care about other people, simply because they are people. We do not need to have a deep, intimate connection with someone in order to value and appreciate another life. Most importantly, in order to feel connected and valued, we must recognize and treasure these small moments and the people we meet along the way – baristas, laundry ladies, yoga teachers… For they too make life worth living – just as much as our besties, boyfriends and brothers.

Till next time when I review Twelfth Night in the Park, om, chanti, chanti, chanti, namaste.