regulars

My favorite building on one of our walks to a coffee shop.

My dear friend,

When we first moved to Minneapolis and wanted to figure out the city, we explored coffee shops and ice cream parlors because we couldn’t afford to eat out at all the restaurants. This is how we found some of our favorite spots: Isle Bun and Coffee, Spyhouse, Sebastian Joe’s.

(This is also how we discovered a place called Leather & Latte, which was not—as I had originally thought—a coffee shop that also sold charming handbags and wallets!)

The back entrance to the Ratios garden.

By now we’ve learned a lot about coffee shops in Cairo, too. Ratios is the pricey German Bakery with dense bread and velvety kale, but the cinnamon rolls are too sweet and it’s hard to find a place to sit because the garden is always packed with European expats and their children. (On the plus side, Ratios is near a leather shop that really does sell charming handbags and wallets, and from which I purchased the brass headband that has quickly become—thanks to water shortages and over-chlorinated hair—my signature Cairo style!) The coffee shop Wanted has decent juice and good carrot cake, but the smoothies are made with syrup, there’s no outdoor seating, and the interior of the cafe is cloudy with cigarette smoke. The charming local bookstore Diwan offers a shady, usually empty patio, but there isn’t any wifi.

And so we’ve become regulars at Beanos, a cafe frequented by Egyptians and expats alike. It’s an eight-minute walk from our apartment, which is pleasant in the morning, as long as we can weave through the drops of water falling from the air conditioners that cling to upper-story balconies. We always find a seat outside. The “Arabian latte” with cardamom is perfectly sweet (as soon as I stir in three little packs of brown sugar), and some of the smoothies are green. We know—from experience—not to choose the table beneath the tree where all the birds are nesting. When the fan is plugged in, we try to situate ourselves in the middle of the draft because it blows away the flies.

On our first visit, our server was more bewildered than impressed by our efforts to order in Arabic. On our second visit, C. and I practiced saying “I would like a strawberry juice, please” over and over, as quietly as possible, until the same server arrived at our table. Although he remained impassive as C. recited the phrase, the strawberry juice appeared a few minutes later. This felt like the greatest triumph of our week. (It had been a hard week!)

On our third visit, the same server seemed pleased to see us. He taught us how to say, “No, I don’t want anything else.” The first time I arrived without C., he asked me where my friend was. Now he brings us plates of extra cookie-muffins, grins and waves whenever we appear, and calls me “princess” as he passes by our table. Why would I ever go anywhere else?

I don’t know exactly why, but this connection feels like the most important one I’ve made in months. It could be because Cairo, though exhilarating, is also lonely. Or it could be because I’d forgotten, in the isolation of the preceding pandemic year, the pleasure of the casual acquaintanceship. Probably it also has something to do with the language barrier, and this man’s willingness to stand patiently beside the table while I rummage through my meager catalogue of words in order to find something new to tell him. No matter what I say, his gaze turns kind and his expression softens behind his mask. Without fail, he replies: “You are welcome, princess.”

Although “you’re welcome” is, of course, the learned response to “thank you,” the origins of the phrase are more deeply rooted in hospitality. According to The New York Times, “The saying stems from the Old English ‘wilcuma,’ which wedded the words “pleasure” and “guest” to allow hosts to express their openness to visitors.” Perhaps this is why the expression, when uttered on that coffee shop patio, has come to feel strangely meaningful and oddly reassuring.

This “welcoming” refrain is also something we hear whenever an Egyptian asks us where we’re from and we reply “Amreeka.”

“Welcome to Egypt!” our interlocutor will inevitably exclaim with raised arms and a wide smile. “Are you friends with Joe Biden?”

These exchanges at Beanos this week have left me thinking about the poem “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris. (I first encountered the poem on the Slowdown, a lovely, meditative poem-a-day podcast that aims to carve out space in our hectic lives for language and beauty.) I’ve enclosed it with this letter for you. In the poem, the speaker catalogues all of the “small kindnesses” that strangers perform for us: they “pull in their legs” when “we walk down a crowded aisle,” or they help us pick up the lemons that “spill” from our shopping bags. “Mostly,” the speaker explains, pointing to these seemingly minor acts of thoughtfulness, “we don’t want to harm each other.”

The unexpected plate of cookie-muffins that our server sets beside my laptop certainly counts as one such “small kindness.” Like the speaker in the poem, does this man recognize that I, too, am “far from tribe and fire”? Does he sense that there are days when I do not venture from the apartment, or days when my interactions with this teeming city are confined to “only these brief moments of exchange” with him? Will I find a way to thank him, I wonder, for his gift of making us feel as as though we are seen, acknowledged, and expected here? As though we might actually belong?

Near the end of “Small Kindnesses,” the speaker calls such interactions between strangers “the true dwelling of the holy.” Perhaps it’s because, unlike the relationships between family and friends, strangers owe us nothing. If I email a friend, she will likely feel obliged to write me back. If I call my parents and they don’t answer, I expect that they will try me later. But the stranger at the coffee shop owes me nothing but the cardamom latte I’ve ordered and paid for. Everything else—his patience, his language, his nod of recognition—is a gift freely given. It is unexpected; it is undeserved. It’s an act of grace.

Yours—L.

Enclosed: “Small Kindnesses,” by Danusha Laméris.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”