The Coffeehouse, a.k.a. the Quiet Car
By Melissa Ludtke

I walk into a local coffeehouse in Cambridge, MA. It could have been an Amtrak quiet car. What I hear is silence. Heads down, screens up. Empty cups set to the side. Missing are overhanging signs to declare a silent zone. Oh, and the conductor’s voice reprimanding the errant phone talker.

On trains I sit in the quiet car, even when I’m with a friend. We read, lifting our eyes for a few irresistible glimpses of the Rhode Island and Connecticut coasts, nodding our joy to each other as the sunlight sparkles on the ocean. It’s my respite before the busy chaos of New York City or my arrival back at South Station to confront the reality of all I’ve left undone.
Just walking into this coffeehouse to look for my friends makes me feel as though I’ve sneezed at a symphony playing Mozart‘s Adagio and Fugue in C minor. I know my friends and I are going to talk. Heck, we might even laugh out loud. Knowing this, I question whether we should walk in. But this is our reason for gathering here – three friends meeting a new friend.
A coffeehouse seems a good place to meet.
Since my friends aren’t here, I go outside to sit, scanning the street to find another place where we could go. Where we can talk.
When my friends arrive, I share Plan B: “We can’t talk in there,” I tell them, gesturing towards our original destination. I point to a restaurant across the street. “We can talk there.” One of my friends isn’t ready to budge. “We should be able to talk if we want to talk,” she says. So off she goes, into the coffeehouse. Her scouting trip.
“Okay,” she says, when she exited. “Let’s just go across the street.”
At the restaurant, we order iced tea and coffee. Our server asks for our food order and we tell her we wouldn’t be eating. We explain why we’re here.
“Oh, we don’t have Wi-Fi,” she says, smiling.
We laugh. Together.
No Wi-Fi.
Now we have to talk.
Wi-Fi + our gadgets = talking, as easy to avoid.
Walking our dogs we stare into our phones. A screen demands our attention.
To find out what’s happening somewhere else.
“Let your fingers do the walking” takes on a fresh meaning.

Text. Don’t dial.
To be old is to use a phone to talk.
Snapchat shows. Then it goes.
Instagram shows and tells.
Twitter = shorthand. (Google it, if you don’t know what the word means.)
Facebook = Scrolling scrapbooks
Gone are days I treasured, when going through scrapbooks meant surfacing stories of precious times past. To gaze at the corner-held, curly-edged photos from my childhood that my mom assembled in scrapbooks rustles memories in ways that no image on my computer screen ever will. Her hands decided which photos tell what story. Her hands wrote the visual narrative that my memories now fill in.
When we don’t talk to each other, here’s what we lose
The intuitive signals we voice — by our tenor and pace, with our pauses and our urgency, through our coolness and our heat.
Passion flies. Boredom sits.
An emoji will never do what our voices can.
Giggle
Laugh
Grieve
Speak our sadness. Truly.
Display our closeness. In whispers.
Prompt desire for distance.
In talking, we respond. It’s what humans do. It’s why we created language.
When we don’t talk, we lose our stories.
The ones humans share over cups of coffee or glasses of tea.
Our gossip doesn’t feel the same. No longer does layer add to layer in real time until suddenly a new story emerges.
We lose being eye to eye, as we are when we really talk,
When we’re close enough, attentive enough, to see tears pool in a friend’s eye.
To turn our gaze as her hand sweeps away that first tear to fall on her cheek.
Giving her the privacy such a moment craves.
With our expression, we speak.
Often effectively in silence.
As we comfort, we connect.
In the morning, on our way to work, we stop for coffee with a friend. Share what’s ahead.
Talk connects us before screen time begins.
Going home, we meet a friend. At a coffeehouse. We tell stories from our day.
I lend an ear. She shares a worry.
We talk.
Coffeehouse: Here is how it’s defined.

Perhaps it’s time to add a definition:
4. A public place serving coffee and other refreshments, where sometimes people talk.
The end.
Melissa Ludtke is writing a memoir about gaining access for women reporters into Major League Baseball locker rooms in her groundbreaking 1970s legal case, Ludtke v. Kuhn. She is also the creator and co-producer of Touching Home in China; in search of missing girlhoods, a transmedia storytelling project with Open Source lessons and resources for middle-school, high school and college.
