Vietnamese Coffee and Getting Old

When I was 24, I had a fancy job working for the Department of State. I moved to Washington, DC with exactly seven cardboard boxes, one suitcase, and a bike. I left the last odds and ends of college in a box for goodwill. I was thrilled to be in a new city (my brief hiatus in Tucson, AZ had included providing childcare for the local YMCA camp and seeking house-sitting jobs in between being desperately heartbroken over having to leave San Francisco) and I was more thrilled to be starting a Grown-up Job which I had worked very hard to get. I moved into a furnished apartment at 10pm that night and tried to ignore the fact that it looked like someone had slept in the bed and the apartment manager was asleep (or dead, it was all the same at that point).

This particular job involved learning a new language, how to destroy the company china upon a coup, and the fine knack of signing a contract without over-committing the United States government. It took a year to do all that. The language took the longest and the china nearly so, contracts, schmontracts. In that year, I ate cuisine I hadn’t imagined existed and went to fancy dress parties with my classmates who spoke Arabic and Hebrew without blinking and had all studied at lofty institutions. They came from Boston and New York and a few had been in DC all along with their more than seven boxes and cats and comfort.

To say I felt out of place is an understatement.

But I had the slight advantage of an undiagnosed bit of crazy and so threw myself into blind dating, spin classes, soccer teams, and an unstoppable drive to make up for all the missing bits and pieces. I did not do my language homework (you can imagine how far that got me). I joined friends at restaurants and threw on my most extroverted exterior. This self I have now, the one that fights anxiety everyday, was sat on, pushed down and drowned under heaping amounts of Thai iced tea, Afghan cuisine, baba ganoush, Ethiopian injera, and tzatziki. And then I had one of the most important memories I’ve had yet.

One mosquito-free summer night I was invited to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant not too far from my apartment. I walked there and met two of the most cultured members of my training class. They had invited me. I didn’t speak much during the meal except to laugh appropriately, eat my food appropriately, and contribute a small bit of humor here and there. They laughed at my jokes. The lights dimmed and twinkly lights glowed to life. The dinner lasted well into the evening, long after the utilitarian consumption of food (this luxury, I was learning, was a thing amongst adults). It culminated with Vietnamese coffee suggested by one of my companions.

I hadn’t had coffee before but I was not about to share that humiliating bit of information. The server brought tiny tin pots of espresso to place on top of mug of sweetened condensed milk. We turned the tiny dial on the bottom of the tin cup and the espresso dripped slowly into the milk, melting it as it drained, leaving behind a cup of sophistication I had never experienced. It was delicious, much like the warm humid air, the good company, and the sense of belonging I was feeling for the first time in months.

I’ve felt that feeling since, but never so intensely. It was years before I understood the joys and camaraderie of coffee. And now here I am, 21 years from that moment, sitting in a cafe, drinking Vietnamese coffee, and wondering if I should cut back my coffee consumption in order to make the unexpected hot flashes less startling. I can only assume these are the heralding bells of peri menopause. I refuse to read any more about it since the symptoms and their timeline are so depressing. So let’s think about the beautiful things, like the last drops in the cup beside me, the mosquito-free spring morning, and the comfortable buzz of strangers.