Phone Calls, Smiles, and Coffee Dates

The phone rings. It’s my mother. I feel all of my body’s cells turn toward her voice like a satellite dish responding to a signal. Her voice contains her face, the house where she lives, and the chair in which she sits as we talk. The sound of her voice brings with it all of our years together, her being my mother, the most constant presence in my life since I entered life. The phone calls continue the link that seems to have no beginning in time. Our voices meet and embrace, they connect us until we can see each other in person. Through the phone calls (I’d like to say they are daily, but neither of us is that organized), we reinforce and enjoy our being together.

Jack has a standing Sunday phone date with his best friend, Harvey, who lives three thousand miles away. The phone call allows their voices to come together and cheat the three time zones that pretend to separate them. The phone keeps them joined through a conversation they began thirty years ago.

A long-distance phone call was once a luxury indulged on special occasions—I remember Christmas calls to my grandparents when we were two continents away. Now the mobile phone keeps us in such constant contact that the sound of another’s voice or the sight of their peculiar texts is a daily, indeed hourly, phenomenon. No longer as rare, such contact is still a strand in the network that grows and breathes and binds us each to each. We enter the world of our friends and invite them into ours—“You’ll never guess who I saw today!”—by maintaining this simple open channel. It is a way of greeting the other. A way of saying, “I’m thinking of you, just wanted you to know.”

I’m standing in line at the farmers’ market. I have my eye on a particularly luscious display of late-harvest tomatoes. A woman approaches to take a closer look at the produce. She brings with her a small child in a stroller. I look down and notice the baby. All of a sudden the child sees me and a huge grin spreads across his little round pink face. The smile is so incandescent that others look down to see what bit of magic joy has just occurred. They are as smitten as I am with the simple perfection of a child’s smile. The kid grows bold with the power of his smile. His feet start bouncing. We are all now saturated with this radiance. The smile is irresistible and leaves each of us standing around the stroller beaming and we keep on beaming as we continue on through the morning.

That small moment of shared smiles—always unplanned, always welcomed—has reminded us each of our shared humanness. We know the power of being a baby, and the pure gift of an unrehearsed smile from a little stranger, who is of course not a stranger at all but a moment in the life of us all.

I remember being in Barstow one hot morning, walking to the car to continue the drive to Las Vegas on Route 66. Seated on a bench outside the motel office were three ancient men, one with a cane, another holding a cup of coffee. They looked up as I walked by. I smiled at them—a big, glowing, Marilyn Monroe smile. All three lit up and smiled back. One of them waved. Another called out, “Good morning there, young lady.” A momentary love fest ensued. Smiles all around. It had cost me nothing, and I could see how happy it made them. I was the real winner, receiving three big grins for my single one. All because I smiled at three strangers. Strangers no more.

Once a month I meet my friend Lisa for coffee. It began as coffee, and grew to include something in the way of a pastry. I stop by her house at 10:00 a.m. on the first Wednesday of the month—it’s negotiable, but rarely alters. She pops out the front door and we begin jabbering. As I drive out of her neighborhood I ask, “Where shall we go today?” We pick a likely coffeehouse or cafe, somewhere within a ten-minute drive. Once we’d tried everything within a five-mile radius, we settled on our favorite spot, a bakery that had plenty of parking, terrific coffee, untold diverse pastries, and always a table available for us to occupy.

Lisa is a fellow writer and so sometimes the monthly coffee date includes kvetching about how our work is (or isn’t) coming along. We unravel literary snarls together. Other times there are pictures to share from some recent bit of travel. Mostly the point is to sit there and feel each other’s familiar shape, smile, tone of voice, and laughter. The laugh is always a big piece of the joy we take in each other’s company. Frankly, if anyone asked me, “So what do you and Lisa talk about?” I wouldn’t be able to come up with a solid reply. What we do is meet over coffee and smile and listen and taste the pastries. I offer her a bite of mine if I think it’s something she’d like. We never question why we need to get together. We simply accept that it should happen, so we make time for this time together.

Like the smile or the phone call, the meeting over coffee solidifies a longstanding friendship. It ensures that a bit of me is infused by our time together. Things are now seen through the renewed lens.

When things are humming along in the social world, we seep in and out of each other’s pores. I smile at a stranger, and that smile is enough to open the door of the world a crack wider than it was before. The stranger catches the smile and throws it further. And now there are others who begin to smile. The attitude of uplift shared—a smile—changes all the alignments in the body. A smile is our inner, secret joy turned inside out, like the lining of a coat now worn on the outside for others to see.

When I was a very serious young woman, I was convinced that the whole point of meeting with someone was to solve some problem, talk something over, or plan a specific event. Now I know that being with another person, at its fullest, is simply about being with them. Being with Lisa, I am also with my self. I expand in moments like this, moments where there is no need of an agenda. The smile shared with a stranger has no quantifiable outcome. It serves no practical purpose. It is a moment of just being human. The priceless and mundane poetry of communication. The coffee is just the icing on the cake.