I’ll confess something small. When I bring my laptop to the café and put my headphones in, the music is turned down to almost nothing. The headphones are a courtesy. They tell the room I’m busy, and once the room decides I’m busy it forgets I’m there, and once it forgets I’m there it starts to talk. So I sip my coffee, I nudge my cursor around to keep the screen looking like work, and I listen to all of you. It is the nosiest thing I do all week and I have made my peace with it.
This morning the whole place was arguing.
The two by the window were deep in the election, each of them certain the country would be fine if the other sort of person would simply stop voting. Behind me, two men I’d have put in a pew on Sunday were disagreeing about which of them God had actually meant. A pair of students near the counter were sorting out who gets to speak for whom, warm and sharp and warm again in the space of a sentence. A man on the phone was losing a fight about his father’s house. Somebody’s grandmother was explaining, to a patient nephew, exactly how the young people had ruined a thing she loved. Every table its own little weather system. And every single voice sure of the same thing — that the trouble with the world was sitting one table over, wearing the wrong opinion, and that if that one table would just come around, the rest of us could finally exhale.
I sat there with my cooling coffee thinking how badly each of them wanted the other one sanded down. Smoothed. Agreed-with. Gone, even, in the polite way we mean when we say someone should “come to their senses.” Everyone in that room wanted a quieter room. A room that matched.
And then I did the thing I always do when I get overwhelmed, which is reach for the end of my scarf.
It’s a thrifted one, loud blues and a rust orange that should not get along. I love it more than the sensible ones. And I sat there running it through my fingers and thinking about how a scarf is even made, which is a strange thing to find calming, but here we are.
A scarf is two armies of thread that want nothing to do with each other. One set runs the long way, pulled tight on the loom, stubborn, holding still. The other set runs crossways, over and under, against the grain of the first the whole length of the cloth. They cross at a hard angle. They pull opposite directions. That arguing — that over-and-under, that refusal to lie down the same way — is the only reason the thing holds heat. Lay all the threads down facing one direction, agreeable, all in harmony, and you don’t have a scarf. You have a hank of yarn that slides apart in your hand and warms no one. It takes the crossing. The warmth lives in the disagreement of the threads.
I am not going to walk over to those tables and fix anybody. That’s not my job and I’d be terrible at it. But I did sit there a while longer than my coffee required, holding my ridiculous orange-and-blue scarf up to the window light, thinking that maybe the room wasn’t broken. Maybe the room was a loom. Maybe it always has been. We are a country woven out of threads that pull against each other — have been since the first morning of the thing — and the warmth we keep getting is the warmth a single matching thread could never give us. A good that’s only good for the people who already agree with you isn’t a very big good. It’s one thread. It keeps one person warm, and only on a mild day.
So I finished my coffee. I left a generous tip, because the barista had a busy morning of weather systems to weather. And I wound that loud scarf one more time around my neck on the way out, grateful, for once, that none of its threads could agree on anything.
Small joys, big deals. Stay warm out there. It’s scarf weather, and it’s going to be for a while.
