March 21, 2018
“Should I ask?”
Ashton looked between the three of us, a half-eaten meal sitting on the table, the light of several candles flickering across the divide. There was a cacophony of voices and laughter that colored the air, and the table next to us debated animatedly–drunkenly–on the American taste in coffee (or lack thereof) for about a half hour on their own.
London was like this for the three of us, then. The warmly lit restaurant we stumbled upon–called Dishoom, in fact–became one of the highlights of the day. We spent the early afternoon in the British Museum before winding our way back to Shoreditch, walking along the cobbled streets as the sun set and the evening crowds thinned out as the pubs filled and music spilled into the alleyways. The wait for such good food and company had been worth it, and while we sat and basked in the afterglow of a good meal, we couldn’t have helped overhearing such an intense conversation at the neighboring table.
I glanced over at her, my cup halfway to my lips, and laughed, shrugging off the question. “We won’t see them again. Do it.”
She leaned over, innocently, then. “What don’t we know?” Ashton asked, her voice full of curiosity.
The entire table of Australians clammed up, taken aback by the sudden question, especially the woman in an adjacent seat who had passionately expressed that most Americans thought they had a God-given right to good, cheap coffee.
“Americans just have a lower standard for coffee, is all,” one of them stated, quite plainly.
“Think about it!” another said. “You all pay for Starbucks, which isn’t that great in the first place, which in New York is what? Five dollars? You all don’t know what good coffee is!”
He was so utterly invested and flabbergasted at the concept of the American taste for convenience that I laughed, good-naturedly.
Because even though we could have taken offense, he was right.
I would argue most of us don’t really know what a good, well-brewed cup of coffee tastes like, and even if we did, we’d be more likely to care about the caffeine content itself! So when he shot into another bout of of long-winded analysis of the American psyche, we listened and gave feedback, feeding into the cycle of the old-fashioned banter involved in making fun of American culture from an insider’s perspective. But it also opened up very personal questions about the nature of American society today–in a way that I still think about all these years later.
The same man who drunkenly confessed his confusion about the expense of crap coffee in the States also asked, desperately, how so many of us stand by the watch the rate of mass shootings skyrocket in our country. How we, as citizens, have become so desensitized to the violence that most of say to ourselves, how tragic, and move on until the next one happens–sometimes not even a day passing between them. I listened as he, in his drunken daze, tried to understand it himself, mentioning his time studying the States for a university degree and then his association with his American friends and their own perspectives.
But we were outsiders. Maybe, even, people who would help him understand the same thing I still grapple with today.
“We had one,” he said, holding up a finger in the dim light of the restaurant, the noise dying down as patrons parted ways and the room emptied. “In the 90s. He locked an exit and stood in front of the other, and killed nearly thirty people.”
He stopped, then, and his friends, mostly Australian, coupled with a few Americans, though they were from a different region of the States than us. He blinked, his voice a little unsteady when he continued, “And then Australia changed its gun laws. Nothing like it’s happened since. Not on that scale.”
Our conversation wound down eventually, though the lot of us bounced ideas off of each other while Dishoom grew softer, still. We parted ways, and the three of us took the Underground back to the little house in London where we stayed until we left for Feltwell–a wedding waiting on the horizon for us all. Good friends and good company were promised at the end of that particular ride. But still, the conversation sat heavy in my heart for a long moment–enough to make a deep impression on me, so much so I wrote it down in detail.
I think about that man and his band of friends often, their visage laughing and discussing politics mixed with a healthy dose of self-criticism. Their curiosity and discourse were welcome; something I think I have lately lacked under certain circumstances. Disagreement and argument don’t always have to be hostile, and in finding common ground (such crappy cups of coffee), it often makes way for more difficult, harrowing topics.
But I still tell the story often, with the little band of Australians drunkenly discussing such a disappointing, poor American taste in coffee, and I laugh.
Sam