“You need to buy something.”
volatile/travel
I was once mistaken for a homeless man in Eugene, Oregon. At a Starbucks. Middle of the day. All I wanted was a cup of coffee and a brownie. It wasn’t a big thing, but I remember it because of the barista’s discomfort, because of the man at the next table who laughed at her.
In 2016, I bought a car and left my job as an office assistant at an accounting firm in downtown Milwaukee to head west for a month on my own, visiting a couple schools I was thinking about transferring to that fall. I’d saved up enough money to spend a whole month on the road, going from Milwaukee to Walla Walla, to Colorado Springs, to Seattle.
If I’m being honest, though, it was a rather lost time in my life. I didn’t like working at the accounting firm, I didn’t like having to sort and stack and file and shred all that paper, I didn’t like that they gave me my own office or put my name on the door. It felt very constricting as a nineteen-year-old. Like if I wanted to, or if I didn’t try to stop it, I would end up at that corner building forever. So, I bought a 2008 Jeep Compass, packed up some camping gear, my camera, and went west looking for a new school and a purpose.
I found one of those things in Colorado Springs. A city I’ve come to appreciate in the three years I’ve lived here since the fall of 2016. The other I didn’t find until I moved here. But that’s not the point, the point is that I went searching, and even though the journey itself wasn’t an answer, it set me on the path to an answer. But an answer that has been steadily growing in the rearview ever since I started at Colorado College. Now I’m faced with another choice, another journey to find another purpose. Always searching for another purpose is essential to happiness. Those purposes are what drive us forward, keep us reading and learning, keep me writing, all the work I do, all the traveling, is to find another purpose, to maybe stumble upon something worth working towards.
I stopped in Eugene on my way to meet a friend in Seattle. I had a few days to kill and had just spent a week wandering around the Redwood Forest. I found in those trees a smallness that humbled me, told me to keep walking. I’d kept a journal while on the road, and I wanted to spend the morning in Eugene reflecting on my time in the Redwoods.
I picked a Starbucks.
That should have been my first mistake. Had I known then that specialty coffee would become a passion and a possible career path, I would have looked for better coffee, somewhere I wouldn’t have been mistaken for a homeless man.
I ordered a small black coffee and a brownie because I wasn’t too hungry and had already had a breakfast of peanut butter on tortillas.
The barista and I exchanged a pleasant few words, nothing I remember now, but if I did it might point to her growing discomfort. I should mention that I was wearing jeans I hadn’t washed in two and a half weeks of hiking in the desert, that I had patched on the thigh with fabric from a flannel I tore while hiking in southern Idaho, a sweater that was a size or so too big, and a blue rain jacket that had seen a few storms in Colorado.
I did, however, have my nice Osprey backpack and computer with me, though the barista wouldn’t have noticed.
I sat down and enjoyed my coffee and brownie, writing about the forest and all I’d learned about myself in the last week. (That I needed to have access to the outdoors, that I needed to enjoy the outdoors with people and not only on my own, that I wanted to go to Colorado College and not Whitman, that I needed to take a few risks in the remaining years of college to figure out what exactly I wanted to do.) The battery on my computer drained and all the seats close to outlets were taken, so I started to pack up, I threw out the brownie wrapper and the coffee cup and was almost out the door when someone else stood up from a seat near an outlet and I decided to stay. I was unpacking again, plugging my computer in, when the same brown-haired, almost young-mother looking barista who I’d bought the coffee and brownie from, came up to me and said, “If you’re going to hang out for a while, you need to buy something.”
To which I responded: “More than just the coffee and brownie I already bought?”
The man next to me laughed at the barista and said, “Whoops” in a tone that was clearly embarrassing for her. I can’t speak for him, but I didn’t intend to embarrass the barista, I truly was confused about why she would think I needed to buy something more to “hang out for a while.”
The barista went red and fumbled an apology, and, in perhaps my most tactless moment of my entire trip, I said, “Also, is there a code to the bathroom?”
The man, who had an unkempt beard, long greasy hair, jeans, and work boots, chuckled again, I felt a little ashamed at the time for asking her in the middle of her embarrassment, but I really did have to use the bathroom.
She gave me the code and hurried away. The man said something else to me that I neither heard nor responded to, and I finished journaling and then left Eugene. I haven’t been back since, though I’d like to see with older, wiser eyes what kind of town it truly is. I don’t want to judge the entire city on one awkward Starbucks experience, but as it stands, that’s all I know.
