querencia

Jo's Coffee, South Congress Street, Austin

Meeting a town is like meeting a person; sometimes you just click. Small, serendipitous things that happen when you click with a town, as if the place and its population have conspired to make you feel content there, welcome.

Austin has a talent for offering this kind of ethereal warm welcome. Sometimes the gesture is elaborate—as it was last spring, when Jo’s Easter Pet Parade welcomed us to town as if it were specially designed to amuse the hell out of us. A drum major and a sousaphone player in musty thrift-store uniforms led a proud line of two dozen costumed pets. Their inordinately proud and unselfconscious owners marched, smiling, and I couldn't tell how much they were serious, how much tongue-in-cheek. They stalled four lanes of traffic, a testament to the power of silliness in this place.

More often, as this morning, the welcome is nothing more than a very friendly and instantly warm conversation with a stranger—where he parks his baby right next to you and walks to the counter to get napkins (this makes you feel awfully good—it tells you that in this place, you’re not suspect or freakish, but kind and decent; the world at large and you agree about your character, here—it’s the ultimate gesture of a stranger’s trust in your goodness). This, after your eyes met and you gave your standard smile—you imagine that it’s shy-but-sufficiently-friendly, but you’ve never seen what it actually looks like—and he replies with a beam and a “how’s it going?” that is actually, astonishingly, followed by a pause indicating that he hopes for a real answer. You remind yourself that you have to get out of the habit of replacing “hey” with a “how’s it going,” that lacks this pause and eye contact. So he parks the baby, asking your indulgence, which you gladly give and feel very friendly and gracious for doing. You make lame-but-nice comments about the baby, he asks you what you’re reading; just as he’s spooning applesauce into the baby’s mouth, his order is called out and set on the counter; you offer to get it for him. He refuses, but does a double take and introduces himself, offering a hand to shake.

This is a gesture that I love and that I need to master: not the double-take, the warm and authentic introduction. The gesture that tells a person she has moved beyond small talk and into the possibility of genuine fondness, that she is the kind of person you’d like to know. Giving your name like a gift to some stranger, pulling them a little bit closer to you, sticking out your hand to be shaken. It’s powerful, perhaps because it is the first risk in polite conversation between strangers: the hand could be refused, one’s name withheld. Maybe your offer to get the latte was the first risk, maybe that’s why it struck him and prompted the introduction. Either way, after that point, you feel comfortable going back to reading instead of chatting, knowing that you no longer need to be polite, only real—speaking when you have something worth saying, or asking questions that stem from genuine curiosity. Soon, with applesauce finished, latte fetched, stroller packed, Tobin & son were gone. Nothing terribly profound, just Austin saying, “I’m glad you’re here—” which is profound enough, really.

Thanks, Freetaco, for the photo of the exact spot I'm talking about (it was at www.flickr.com)! What're the chances?