MELISSA'S MOOREEFFOC

There is a new coffee shop in my neighborhood, one that promotes the use of ingredients that are either well adapted or native to Brazil. On a recent jaunt with friends who have all left Sao Paulo for farther reaches of the country or planet, I sipped on a pitanga (aka Surinam cherry) and banana concoction at this new favorite spot and enjoyed a last afternoon together before each of us headed her separate way. As we descended the old rail ties that had been transformed into the coffee shop’s stairs and made our way to the register, we noticed a fantastic almost instant change of light outside the windows. Typical of the tropics, even in this crazy city whose ostentatious concrete monstrosity at times seems flippant to all possible references to nature, the winds picked up out of nowhere and the skies opened in Biblical pomp. The rains poured down in style, and two of us decided it must have been a sign to keep cover amidst the intoxicating coffee aroma and to extend our chatter.

We were hovering by the bar on the ground level of the converted house, deciding where to sit, when my friend noticed a small note chalked on the events board cum menu: “drink a coffee paid ahead; or pay ahead for a coffee. Total: IIII.” The barista explained we could drink a coffee for which another customer had already paid or we could pay for a coffee for someone else; there were four coffees already on the house. My friend, Laura, and I looked at each other, then at the unrelenting rain, then at the barista, then back at each other. She shrugged. I didn’t bat an eye: “I’ll take one.” As the barista erased one tick mark, Laura decided to take up the offer as well. Total remaining: II.

The barista prepared our coffees (espressos, as is typical in Brazil). Just before she set the small cups and saucers on the bar, she handed us each a note card. Apparently, every paid-ahead coffee necessarily come with a note from the coffee donor, and the note can be anonymous or not; in fact, bar the rule requiring its existence, there are no rules at all constricting the note: it can be silly, serious, in any language, in hieroglyphics, a crayon doodle, a long-winded essay, or even a long-winded essay written in crayon.

It seemed a beautiful idea, but my friend and I were both skeptical. Brazil. Our amateur, data-less analysis was that Brazilians are very helpful, gracious and hospitable, but if they can get something for free without working, they certainly will. Both Laura and I wondered out loud how this particular coffee shop had thus managed to build up an espresso surplus of four (about to be two) given what we had always observed. We waited for the coffee before opening our respective notes, chatting about each having “one foot behind”, the Brazilian term for healthy disbelief. The barista prepared our coffees in silence and smiled sublimely.

Just as the steaming coffee was placed before me, I opened the note card:

"I'll go on as I am
And I'll go on as I can
Throwing myself to the world
Traversing every last corner
There's a bit that I'll leave and a bit I'll receive
Through the natural law of encounters."



I didn’t drink the coffee right away. Actually, I just blushed. I reddened like an adolescent in love from how perfectly, cosmically directed this little note had been, in content and in context. Truth be told, I am a terrible correspondent. But, I am an excellent match-maker (both the prosaic and romantic kind), and the “natural law of encounters” is how I go about much of my life, weaving people and ideas together when something just fits (cooking encounters that lead to lifestyle changes that lead to awarded creativity, sending stories of dealing with death to a friend I only later find out had recently needed exactly a story to accept a devastating loss, bringing future lovers together over daring red hues on a large wall canvas, matching up friends in places as far away as Malawi). And how much more fitting to receive and read this poem in a place where I was in harmony with essence of my surroundings, my being an ingredient also well-adapted to Brazil.

Another friend recently asked for true stories about coincidences and I told her the coincidence story that always makes me happiest to think upon is actually one of exquisite cosmic encounters that span three countries and include a cowboy, a muddy rainstorm, a war, a broken motorcycle, capoeira, two cases of wine, some homemade bread with handpicked basil and unpasteurized milk, a death, an extramarital love affair, a crowded beach, two ghosts and a wedding. I will never blog this story or write it up; any curious reader of mine may perhaps hear it by sitting with me over a very, very, very long meal where the phrase “the natural law of encounters” will take some new shape through the story’s very retelling and reliving.

But, if I never retell that particular set of coincidences, it doesn’t really matter; the stories from some other cosmic coincidences will always waft into my life of their own accord and be retold and relived and reloved in their due time. When I “[throw] myself to the world,” that is - when I go about living, that “natural law of encounters” is simply intuited, defined, if at all, in sentiment and subtlety, and demarcated by things not usually attributed with any memorable power of definition – things like a small cup of common Brazilian espresso.

Of course, the coffee that engendered this retelling was the most amazing coffee I had yet had. I drank it traveling at mental light speed to whomever had left me the note and to all of my favorite stories of cosmic encounters, to moments earlier when I had voiced my skepticism that paying ahead a coffee could not take hold in Brazil and then full speed back to the present with my humble understanding that a no-rule coffee note inevitably conveys whatever is truly in the heart of the person who pays forward a coffee. I drank my coffee traveling to the time I first met my friend with whom I was enjoying this coffee and its anonymous note – my neighbor when I first arrived in Brazil who showed up at my door with a small carrot cake and ended up staying for dinner and a long chat and subsequent dinners and coffees and chats week after week after week.

Now at the end of her brief return to the city, Laura was smiling majestically, sipping her coffee, feeling blessed. And I was drinking my coffee, loving her smile, and thinking how desirous I was to pay ahead 500 coffees so 500 people could feel their hearts as filled as mine.