prompt: heart, title: whitman's sampler in misc. flash fiction

For a while before the COVID times, I worked in the one fancy-style coffeehouse within a wide radius, in a small farm-town along the Mohawk. I wasn’t great at the beautiful latte art part of it but I could make a mean espresso and was solid at chatting up with customers who liked to talk. The amazing thing was how I could be there in that gleaming shop, making a ten-dollar Chemex pour-over from single-origin beans for a regular from New York City who just weekend here in their “country house” because it was the only place they could acquire coffee anything like back home. Which, as someone who once went flat-broke in Brooklyn myself, made me proud but it wasn’t the amazing thing. The amazing thing was that I’d be doing all that and yet look out the window onto Canal Street and there was an Amish buggy with horses relieving themselves for all eyes to see, making piles larger than some rich-girl’s purse puppy, but it all still fit together.

Making green-tea matcha lattes with floral infusions and house-made syrup there at the edge of the Amish country, it was the kind of contradiction that makes my heart glad. I love to see when things co-existing that aren’t supposed to mesh, just aren’t supposed to be in the same place and yet there they are and it works just fine. Some cocktail-shaker frothed espresso drink and a man in his straw-hat swatting flies away with a wooden fan. It’s all these extant contradictions of the human experience that make this whole thing cook. As Whitman said of a mind, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes” so too for a human race entire. Those clashes of false-dichotomy proving themselves wholly harmless are where the wisdom comes from, where growth comes from, where we finally find perspective. So many of the things our imaginary structures convince us incompatible, with the right kind of experience, we can see the exclusive definitions are meaningless. Swear to God, that’s where the fun begins.

Then you start seeing all the other ways all your pre-conceived notions break down too. You’re in the Price Chopper in Nelliston, buying candies and beers to sneak into the drive-in across the street, and you see a small Amish woman surreptitiously perusing their day-old counter for pies and donuts. Suddenly, your mind flashes to that farm-stand down the road where they sell their “homemade” baked goods and you realize that they’re the same thing. And you don’t scold her, you don’t narc her out, you just give her a wink and you laugh. You laugh at how many of the things people hold dear as definitions are just lies to make themselves feel important and pure.

If we contradict ourselves, we contradict ourselves, we are large, we contain multitudes, we are truly legion. At the edge of the Amish country, you can quickly see, everything else is horseshit.