So I have decided to do something about it. On many occasions over the last few months, when I’ve been seated at a table and people are standing around with mugs and plates in their hands, I’ve shared the table. There were two women who meet for coffee regularly. There was a guy and his sister, who was here for the holidays from somewhere back east. There was a guy and his daughter, who was about eight or nine years old. There was a woman who was expecting someone who never showed. It’s not that big of a deal. We didn’t have to have conversations. The little snippets about each of them that I just shared were all overheard by simply listening after saying hello and you’re welcome and please, by all means, have a seat. Then I’d return to my book. In all instances there was nothing painful or even awkward about sitting at the same table with complete strangers. We all came through it unscathed.
At the coffee shop in my neighborhood there is a large table in the front that I’ve always thought of as the group table, or the community table. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption on my part, but it’s larger than all the other tables and it’s rectangular rather than round. Once, one guy told me in a rather condescending tone that he was “sort of, um,” waiting for a couple of friends to join him and that the seating at that table is, “you know, first come, first served.” And I just kind of glared and said oh, okay, and sat down, and after a few minutes he packed his shit and left. I think that’s what got me started.
Recently, I was at Ikea and I stopped at the cafeteria for the meatballs, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. In Portland, the cafeteria faces west, and there’s something quite nice about gazing out on a silvery winter afternoon at the fields and the hills off in the distance and the airport, watching the planes come and go. I sat at the end of one of the long, narrow tables that has eight chairs on each side. I want to say that one more time: It has eight chairs on each side. Although the cafeteria was pretty busy that afternoon, I had that table all to myself. I felt slightly guilty as people scurried about with the trays, their worried looks, their merchandise, but only slightly. Of the 16 chairs at the table where I sat, only one was taken. When I got up to leave two groups – one of three, the other four – raced, and I mean raced, toward the table I was leaving. One group got there first, as often happens, and so a woman from the group that reached the finish line second said “Oh, I’m sorry” and stepped back a bit and looked at the members of the victorious party with an awkward expression on her face. “My God,” I said as I walked away with my tray, “there are sixteen chairs.”
I have no idea what it is that infuriates me so much about all of this. People not being able to share space might strike me as a little bit too solid a metaphor for what is either an increasing inability to connect with new people or an increasingly alarmed reaction to my ongoing inability to connect with new people. Or maybe it just underscores what I think is the general self-centeredness of people, which seems to me to be on the rise. Or maybe it scares me deep down inside because it causes me to think: Shit, what are we going to do when we really need to help each other? By that, I mean, how will the seat savers and public space hoarders behave when the water and power get turned off, or shut down? You know as well as I do how they’ll behave: Badly.
Anyhow, the other day I met a friend for lunch over in an area of Portland called the Pearl. If you don’t live in Portland, the Pearl is what happens when a lot of mostly white people with a lot of money decide that it would be cool to acquire an urban lifestyle and, in the course of less than a decade, take over a neighborhood that was previously one sketchy block after another of warehouses, loading docks, broken windows and railroad tracks. I’m developing a bit of affection for the people who live over there, I must say, and here is why. They paid their million dollars or more for their view of the city and the mountains and then demanded that the post office alter its schedule and the trains reduce the pitch of their whistle. And their demands, of course, were met. They have enough money to build a new skyline so why shouldn’t the noises that were there long before they were be reduced? There’s a wonderful honesty about it, I think. We get what we want, the streets and boutiques and hybrid Toyotas over there whisper, because we pay for it.
The cathedral of the Pearl District, I think, is the Whole Foods store sitting there on West Burnside, a swirl of moneyed, mostly white folks coming and going, carrying the Whole Foods bags and wearing expressions of earnest urgency on their faces. It’s important business down there, getting the purest of the pure, the most organic of the organic. Because the grocery store in my neighborhood does not carry it, I go to Whole Foods to buy brown sugar in bulk, which I use for my oatmeal. This friend of mine who I had lunch with the other day – she’s my former boss, actually – has a thing for late lunches, and I do get hungry, so after I filled the plastic baggie (God forbid) with brown sugar I went over to the bakery section, which I had never visited before, and got myself a ham and cheese croissant. I figured I’d take it over to Powell’s with me and order a cup of coffee, but as I came through the checkout line I noticed the strangest thing: There are long, narrow tables with chairs that are more like bar stools on the Couch Street side of Whole Foods, and although it’s in one of the snottiest neighborhoods in Portland, the tables there are shared without questions, explanations or apologies. I couldn’t believe it.
