Literary snapshots of life…
Vignettes: If we were having a coffee right now…
Vignettes are short pieces, mere moments of encapsulated time like brief scenes in a movie. They are glimpses, not complete stories. They are observations of just a few minutes. They are factual, not fictional. They lack the structure of longer pieces.
Vignettes are pieces we can write when sitting over a steaming coffee in a cafe and observing what is going on around us. Someone called this ‘attentive looking’ and said that fiction writers can turn their observations into scenes. They are also useful in journalism as ways of capturing moments in detail that we can weave into our factual stories. The literary journalists of the 1980s and after did this, capturing settings to discern what they told us about a character in their stories. They can also be written from memory. Vignettes condense a few minutes into a few seconds. They are micro-stories about people and places. Based on real people, real life events and real places, they find a home in the nonfiction genre.
The kicker for the vignettes that follow was to write the opening phrase: ‘If we were having a coffee right now’. This lent itself to stories of reminiscence. It demonstrates how an opening line can direct and structure a piece of writing.
I produced these vignettes for an assignment about short pieces written around a starting phrase — having a cup of coffee. They were published by a now-extinct publication.
Sydney, some years ago…
IF WE were having a coffee right now, my Tasmanian friends, I would tell you that thanks to the photos of the snow-covered mountainscapes I am seeing from your island and despite the tales of low temperatures I am hearing, I would rather be there than here.
Why? Because down there you have seasons that are markedly distinct from one another. Sure, the seasons here up north are marked too, but to a far lesser extent than down there. Here we have heat, a sticky summer heat that makes you sweat when you walk anywhere. Some like it. I don’t. It is uncomfortable. It dissipates your energy and makes you lazy. You feel like you are walking in a greenhouse.
I’m writing on what here is a cold winter day. It is not the sharp cold you have in Tasmania. Mornings here can be bracing but never freezing and there is no snow. Never any snow.
There are other reasons I would prefer to be living in your part of the world, however the weather and the seasons will have to do for now.
Steve
IF WE were having a coffee right now it would probably be in that little coffee bar down by the harbour. The one that set up after the crisis when the Regional Assistance Mission was still in-country. We met there before, remember? We met there the day before we flew out, a whole bunch of us including Emma and the kids. It was a calm, fine day as that time of year usually is in the Solomons.
Maybe, sitting there over our coffee, I would tell you about our journey out to Choiseul and the long, open sea voyage in the motor canoe and how our outboard motor got snagged on a loose ship’s cable out in the straits. I would tell you how instead of simply cutting the cable loose, the skipper and his mate pulled it onboard, hand over hand, until it formed a big coil and weighed down our little motor canoe.
Maybe, too, I would tell you about Steve. He wandered into the farm that serves as our project base out on the edge of Honiara, not all that far from the airport. I don’t have time to discuss him in detail, just to say that he is an American refugee. That’s what I call him. He prefers life in the Solomons to life in the US. He just wandered in one day when I was there. Tony had met him before, so I think that’s how he found us.
He recently came back from Australia. He goes there to work to earn the money that keeps him going in the Solomons. When he wandered in that day he was thinking of going further up the coast. I don’t know if he got there as I haven’t heard from him since.
What I liked about Steve was the way he lived one day at a time. I think he could keep living that way, wandering around the islands for his whole life. That’s the impression I got, anyway. He had no long-term plans, only vague ideas that were likely to change as new opportunities came up.
Oh, yes, I remember. He said something that day he wandered into the project base. It was more a notion than a plan. He had this idea that if he met the right local woman from a coastal village he would marry her. Providing, that is, that her village has good diving out on the reef.
In Coogee
IF WE were having a coffee right now I would suggest we drink up and walk down to Coogee Beach. Why? Because it’s such a good winter’s day here. The sun is shining. The breeze has a bite to it. The sky is clear and it is an intense blue.
We’ve walked along the beach before, all the way from the surf club to the fishermens’ dinghies at the other end. Do you remember? We usually stop at that little coffee shop in the park, the one that makes those authentic fish burgers with lots of vegetables. Would we do that again today? I’m sure we would.
But I’m not at the beach today. I’m here at that little cafe in Randwick that we frequent. You’re not here, of course, you’re at work, probably being exacerbated by some bureaucrat or getting the people back to fix the malfunctioning irrigation again. So I guess I’ll just have to look out onto a blue sky we won’t be walking under and think of that beach we won’t be walking along today.
My missing album
IF WE were having a coffee right now I would remind you that you never returned my Sergeant Peppers album. You borrowed it in 1969 and that was the last I saw of it. Do you still have it or, like our relationship, is it something now decades gone?
I suspect you never had the opportunity to return it. Our liaison ended when you disappeared from my life and I from yours. I understand why that had to happen. You, we, were young and I suppose your parents didn’t want your future hampered.
Did you take my album into your marriage? What happened to it after you divorced? Did you carry it into your new life as a sanyassin? Did it go with you into that little enclave of Rajneesh followers on the coast after your sect disintegrated? Why did I not ask you about it that day I ran into you in that north coast town?
I know I will never see my Sergeant Peppers album again. Just like I will most probably never see you again. That north coast encounter is likely to be a one-off. Like my Sergeant Peppers album, you disappeared so suddenly.
The dome
IF WE were having a coffee right now I would remind you of that day when we drove all the way from the city in your clunky but more-or-less reliable Kombi to the rural block off the side road that takes travellers into the ranges that lie inland of Kempsey. It felt hidden there beside the tall eucalypts, a refuge, not that we needed one and nor did our friends for whom this rural patch was home.
They seemed to be so settled there, now that they had moved out of their tent and were living in their little geodesic dome that still had to be finished. And settled they were. For a while. So different to us. Did we envy them their settled life in the country? We too would have liked to do that, to find a rural patch to call home. But our lives were in transition and that was not for us back then.
We hung out with our friends there before taking the road north, and one day there you were strumming a guitar in the dome. I raised my camera and snapped an image. It’s strange how an image carries a story, like the story of our few days there and the story of our friends’ rural interlude and lives that came together only to split apart and take them to places distant from that hidden patch by the tall eucalypts.
Tasmania
IF WE were having a coffee right now I would say how good it is to be down here where the seasons are distinct and the mountains snow-covered in winter. Where you can walk around in summer without getting covered in a lather of steamy sweat.
We will be having a coffee soon because from the little cafe here I can see your van way down the road. So we’ll sit and talk and drink our coffees and nibble our snacks and I’ll tell you about being thankful for coming here. We’ll talk about our friends over on the mainland and what they are doing. I have much to tell and I suppose you do too. This is the way of old friends who have come and gone as an item.
Then we’ll get into your van and drive to the beach. The water temperature is mild although it is what those where I have just come from would call cold. We have wetsuits. So we’ll spend a little time in the long, lazy swell pushing in from the south. Maybe after that we’ll go get a pizza and sit and eat it by the beach, because that is the way of old friends who have come and gone as an item.
First overnight
IF WE were having coffee right now I would remind you of our first overnight bushwalk when we walked out to Mt Solitary. Do you remember? Maybe not. It was so long ago.
I remember because I have a photo of you, pack on back and looking out to the mountain in the distance. Would I remember it otherwise? I’m sure I would because it was the start of something new in our relationship.
We followed the track along the bottom of the cliffs until we came to the start of the climb. That was interesting. It was a knife-edge ridge from which the cliffs fell away steeply on either side. We made it to the top, though.
And what then? We realised that we should have carried water because there was none where we were to camp. So we scurried around in the bush and found this tiny pool. We boiled it, just in case.
I guess this is ancient history now. We climbed many a mountain after that, set up many a bush camp. Then we went on our own ways in life, you to the dry inland in the far north, me to the city. Only years later did we reconnect as different people in a different town. Yes, we are different to the two who climbed that mountain in those now-distant times, yet somewhere inside us we are still the same.
More vignettes…
Pocket fiction…
Reality and fiction collide and blend. It can be difficult to separate fiction from fact.
Other stories…
