The Man At The Nearest Starbucks

When I lived in the Bronx, I wished that I lived near a Starbucks. It sounds a bit weird - to want to have a branch of a corporate chain near home - but to me, back then, it represented a smidge of upward mobility. Now, though, I get to live in Manhattan, and guess what? There’s Starbucks EVERYWHERE. So many Starbucks that I’ve become immune to them, avoiding their coffee for Stumptown and Counter Culture and other beans of snobbish upward mobility. I do, however, stop in to grab in the occasional free download card so that I can nick an app or song from iTunes. 

A couple of blocks from where I live is the nearest Starbucks. I don’t pop in too often, but in order to make it to my apartment from the nearest subway station, I pass by its storefront, with no less than 5 picture windows looking onto the street. And, without fail, in the last window from the right, I always see the same man. 

I’ve never introduced or spoken to him, so I don’t know his name. In my head, though, he’s become familiar enough to necessitate a name, and he seems like a Brian. Brian is always at the last table from the wall, in the last window from the right, and he’s always on his iPad. Brian doesn’t ever really blend with the other computer-headed coffee drinkers, though, even though I’m sure that there are days that he wishes he could. You see, Brian is a quadriplegic, and he communicates on his computer by putting a pen into his mouth and using it to tap the screen.

Meanwhile, in my classroom in the Bronx, I often find that my students have moments of insane laziness. Too often I hear the refrains of kids who, even though they are capable, want to have basic things handed to me. I’m not talking about textbook work or reading, even. I’m talking about just asking others to do for them when they are more than capable of helping themselves with insane ease.

“Yo, Mister, can you bring that book to me?”

“I don’t want to get up and move, that’s mad work.”

That there are people like Brian out there, who want so badly to do things that they will type with a pen in their mouth just so they can communicate relatively normally with the outside world, blows my mind consistently. They stand in stark contrast with my students, who already have to overcome obstacles of their own in terms of poverty and dangerous neighborhoods, who work so hard and then hit walls where they need to just keep going. Even though I try like hell to be a reassuring voice in their lives, and try to be a steady hand that guides them to good things, there’s a part of me that wants to show them the Brians of this world, who have it so much worse, and yet they keep going and keep going, not being satisfied to be defined by their difficulties.