Isn’t it strange what film captures? I have some moments locked into my memory in detailed, dialogued frame-by-frame, yet I have no pictures of those events. And I have pictures in my photo albums that I have no idea what happened before or after or even during those frozen moments. Do I remember the non-picture moments more because I have to rehearse them so as not to forget them? Socrates believed that writing would make people lazy, relying on the written word to do their remembering for them (an argument still used against calculators in math class). Sometimes I wonder if that’s what photography does for our emotional memories. Occasionally as I people-watch, I see a moment of humanity that I want to capture in my memory. Usually, I don’t have a camera with me (and, more frequently I’m stuck in traffic and unable to write either). So I compose in my mind a detailed “word picture” and write it in my journal when I arrive home later. Strangely, those moments that I have to rehearse in my mind are the moments that stick with me more than the interesting moments that I am able to capture in film. For example, a word picture entitled “Beating the Traffic”: “Yesterday, I saw the funniest thing while stuck at one of the usual hiccups in my commute. This is a part of town that most people don’t venture out in after dark—the more urban part of the suburb. And there on the sidewalk was a guy who had figured out how to beat the traffic hour. While I sat stuck with at least fifteen minutes of inching towards the intersection, he trotted along the sidewalk on a horse—a big, fat, horse. With every step, his tennis shoes bounced against the horse’s sides like those metallic balls in Newton’s Cradles and his backpack leaped up as though trying to escape the jarring reduction of their commute.” I saw that unconventional commuter about six years ago, and I still remember the same impressed amusement I felt then. But I cannot tell you where or why I took this random sunset. I don’t remember the emotional response I had to this scene that caused me to try to capture it. Even though the digital age has augmented our cameras’ capacities, I still think of pictures as a precious, finite roll of film: not one picture in the 24-exposure roll should be wasted. For some reason, my past self thought this summer sunset was worth one of those 24 pictures. If we remember only the moments captured on a 4x6, we would have such empty lives. No one takes pictures of sad frustrations, but we would not learn without them. Few take pictures of daily routine, but those routines are life. (Although now that I think of it, a whole lot of people post pictures of their daily meals; perhaps that’s their attempt to memorialize the mundane.)
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Iced Coffee—It Tastes Like . . . Coffee
I don’t know why, but Fourth of July weekend makes me nostalgic for my days as a barista. In high school and college, I worked for a coffee/pastry/ice cream shop that I have lovingly pseudonymed as Donut World. It was my first job; my best job, my worst job. Donut World was my training ground for work, leadership, and adulthood. My experiences there formed my expectations for the business world. To this day, I still expect “the real world” to follow the same principles that Donut World ran on, even though I’ve never again gotten a fifteen dollar tip just for being an American girl who had to work on the Fourth of July (true story). Every year as it began to heat up outside, our iced coffee and iced latte sales rose with the thermometer. And every year, as unbelievable as it may seem to our coffee-fluent culture, we had people who didn’t understand what they were ordering. (Yes, this was before there were as many Starbucks as there are tourists visiting New York City this weekend.) Late one night after I had been working at Donut World for a year, a group of teen girls came in and two of them ordered iced latte. After paying for their drinks, they tasted them. “Uh, excuse me, ma’am. These drinks are messed up,” one of the girls began. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked. “This tastes like coffee.” “Iced latte is coffee,” I said. “Yeah, but it shouldn’t taste like this.” “What should it taste like?” “Not like coffee. I don’t like coffee.” She is not alone in her ignorance. “Is iced coffee sweet?” Many customers wanted to know. Iced coffee is just as sweet as hot coffee. It’s just cold coffee. Chilling it doesn’t make it sweeter. Yet, so many customers ask “Is the iced coffee sweet?” and then get offended by my answer: “If you want it sweet, it can be. It’s just double-brewed coffee over ice.” And then there are the customers who order iced coffee and wonder where the whipped cream is when they get it. “Doesn’t it come with whipped cream?” “No, ma’am. It doesn’t.” “Well, the picture right there shows whipped cream and chocolate drizzle on top.” The picture, of course, had the conveniently ignored caption denoting the drink as an iced latte, but many customers didn’t see, or taste, any difference between iced coffee and iced latte. To celebrate the Fourth, I think I’ll visit Donut World tomorrow and leave a ridiculously large tip for my iced latte, which I certainly hope tastes like coffee. |
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