This morning I was writing in a coffeeshop when an old man in a feed cap got my attention with a wave. “This seat taken?” he asked, gesturing to the couch across from me.

 

“All yours,” I said, trying to sound friendly, not reflexively resentful at being interrupted. At the same time, my phrasing was clipped, and my eyes went right back to my work. But he was still talking to me. When I looked up, he repeated himself, but I only caught a few words because he had a voice worn soft by time, and I have a hard time picking words out of background chatter and Eighties music and a barista bashing the espresso thingy against the counter. The man ended with a soft heh heh, so I put on a bemused look of Go figure/Whaddya gonna do? and once again looked down at my work. That’s when he said something else that included the word “Alzheimers.”

 

“Pardon?” I said, and really tried to listen. Of course the banging started up again just behind my head (Why do I work there?), and I missed the first half of the story, which ended with this fragment: “…but I told them, if I did have Alzheimer’s, how would I have made it through forty-five years?”

 

He looked at me expectantly. I smiled nervously because I didn’t know what else to do. He frowned and shook his head. “I mean seventy-five years,” he said.  

 

My smile faded. Oh, no.

 

“What do you do?” he said abruptly.

“Pardon?” I said again. I’d heard him clearly that time, but now I was off-balance. Was this guy okay? He didn’t have a drink in front of him. Had he been wandering around? Were people looking for him?

 

Pointing at the notepad on my lap, he asked again what I did. When I told him I was a writer, we had one of those conversations that count as an occupational hazard. Boy, he had a story for me, it happened to be his life story, and would I give him my phone number, please, so he could contact me to start writing it.

 

I have never given out my number in response to such a request, but the man was getting louder and people were looking over, including the hipster by the window thumbing his phone, and, at a loss for what to do in this situation, I found myself writing down my number.

 

The moment I tore it off the page, though, he waved to someone in line. “Keep it,” he told me, then mumbled something about how it was time to be taken away. After the door closed behind him and a woman who might have been his daughter, the hipster looked at me. “That,” he said, “was the best thing ever.” Then he guffawed.

 

I looked down. Looking back, I want to give the hipster the benefit of the doubt—maybe he didn’t hear the business about Alzheimers—but just then I felt sick. I didn’t want to share an ironic sneer. I didn’t want to have anything to do with his scorn.  

 

What did I want? To be a generous person, a person who can listen and be present. The kind of person who doesn’t instinctively shrink away from someone who is reaching out.  

 

But when I ducked my eyes away from the hipster, I saw what kind of person I was.

 

My knees were angled away—from the hipster, from the spot where the old man had sat—like I had been flinching and flinching. The notepad was still in my lap. My hand clutched my own phone number. And I had never put down my pen.