She staggered through the door of the bar, weighed down with packages and brown paper bags and towing a shopping basket filled with bruised, grimy vegetables. She wore a ragged bandana across her forehead but stray strands of hair fell over her eyes and she swiped at them impatiently with dirt streaked hands. Her shoes didn't quite match and she wore only one torn sock. A backpack hung over one shoulder and as she made her way toward the restrooms it snagged on a chair and jerked her back. She cursed and slapped at the offending piece of furniture as if it had intentionally tripped her then scanned the room for other obstacles, her eyes wild and slightly mad. The regulars didn't pay much attention.
The bar was lined with a row of graveyard shift workers - some in scrubs from the local hospital, some in black tie from the casino. They drank steadily and silently and the young bartender refilled their glasses with bored indifference and no effort to begin a conversation. These were tired men and women, wanting an hour or so in a dim bar before heading home to try and sleep while the rest of the city was rising and starting another day. They did not swap stories or tell jokes or compare notes or even flirt - in the daylight, a bar is just a bar, not a gathering place or a lively club. These people did not want to laugh or dance or listen to music - the sun was coming up and they would be going home to drawn shades and blacked out windows. The worlds of day and night people are vastly different and they seldom cross paths.
The woman with the backpack fell somewhere in between. She emerged from the restroom and as she passed me I realized that she was far younger than I had first thought, in her 40's at the most. Soap and water had helped but she still reeked of the street and the customers at the bar did not make room for her although there were empty stools. She shuffled to a table for two and the bartender brought her coffee with a small mug of milk and several packets of sugar. She drank quickly and left a crumpled dollar bill on the table before leaving, jamming the extra sugar packets into one of the paper bags. She didn't speak and no one at the bar looked up as she left although she struggled with the heavy door and gave it a good cursing as it closed behind her. I paid for my morning Coke and left for the motel, worn out after a night of blues and not enough sleep. The streets of the small and very poor Arkansas town were deserted but there still seemed to be music in the air, leftover echoes of guitars and the voices of legendary bluesmen. The backpack woman was in the doorway of one of the music stores, propped up against the splintery wooden door and singing to herself, an old Buddy Guy song that I recognized from the night before. She had emptied a sugar packet into one hand and with the other was pinching little bits of it and dropping them on her tongue. She seemed content among the litter and shadows and when a dozen or so pigeons joined her, she produced a cellophane bag of sunflower seeds from another pocket and threw them on the sidewalk. More pigeons arrived almost immediately and soon there so many that she seemed lost among them, a huddled figure in a doorway eating sugar and feeding birds. She cackled at them and they cooed back like old friends meeting after a long parting.
Contentment in life is often a matter of expectations.
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