Mug Woman, Mug Man
This morning, something happened to me that was straight out of a kicky ’90s music video.
Picture if you will: A brilliant fall morning. The young lady emerges from the door to her building, in her fall jacket, laptop bag clapping against one thigh, teacher-bag clapping against the other, and in her hands she’s balancing a full, ceramic mug of coffee. Zoom in on the mug: it’s white, patterned with pastel hearts and right in the middle, in cheesy ’80s script, teal, with a bad drop shadow, like something from the title credits of ‘Saved By the Bell,’ it reads “Hopelessly Romantic.”
Okay. So. She heads across the street and, even though she seldom sees anyone on her quiet, residential block at this time of the morning, today she almost runs smack into a guy her age, who’s come out from a house on the opposite side and is standing there in a friendly brown corduroy jacket, has a big golden dog on a leash, and is also balancing in his right hand a steaming, ceramic mug (small, brownish-gold glazed, 1970s style) of coffee.
“I thought I was the only one!,” she/I says aloud to him, catching his eye, looking at her mug, and back at his, and noticing that he’s cute. He looks at her mug, at his mug, smiles, says something joke-y of which she hears nothing except for the phrase “the office.” She smiles, pretends she heard him, makes a small reply. He waves, smiles, says “take care” in an amiable way. She waves, smiles back, says bye.
She walks down the street, looks at her mug, re-reads the inscription on it (she forgets it sometimes, she thought it was so funny the day she brought the mug home from the Salvation Army in Ithaca, but after years of everyday use…), thinks, damn, I will probably never see that fellow again.
She does this thing with the mug every morning. Drinks from it while walking down to the subway. Sometimes there’s still coffee left when the train comes and so she sips it, holding onto the pole, pretending not to notice the weird looks that people are giving her.
‘You should’ve asked about the dog,’ she thinks, wondering if she’ll ever get used to grabbing onto people the way you need to, in New York City’s whirl.
Image by Peacock Modern
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