Is this Fine?

I was waiting for my turn to order in a coffee shop. There was a woman ahead of me in the queue; her drink, some kind of healthy latte that I didn’t get the name of. The barista diligently heated, added, frothed, and whatever else was involved in creating the concoction–summoning the tea deities– then presented it to the woman who lifted it to her face, took a sip, and, though pleased, asked, “What are those little chunks in it?” The barista offered an explanation that described the difficulty in taming some of the ingredients into submission but assured the woman that they would assimilate momentarily. The woman kept sipping, wondering. I offered, fully in jest, served with gobs of absurdism and sprinkled with guffaw, 

         “Oh, it’s probably just some ham.” 

Yes, that’s what I said.

          “Oh, it’s probably just some ham.” 

                                  Ham.

The woman replied, quick and serious, 

                 “Oh no, it can’t be ham.” 

Yes, that’s how she replied.

                 “Oh no, it can’t be ham.”


I looked at her to see if she was exhibiting any subtle, sly, grokking of the joke. I wanted there to be something. 

   “Oh God, please let there be something." 

–A wink. A nod. Pointing her finger at me as if to say, Good one! 

                     There was nothing. 

                            No thing. 

I checked to see if she actually existed–had mass and wasn’t a mirage or a terrible dream. She cast a shadow, and I heard her footfalls on the shop floor, so, yes, she had mass. Did she have thumbs? Yes, two. I counted as she tended to her troubled beverage, so she was, if we can make a broad assumption, a functioning adult human–adult, because any child would have understood the gag. This woman had taken my suggestion that there was possibility, on some bizarre reality scale, that yes, ham was indeed, a possible ingredient in any drink, ever.  I wanted to lay myself down where I stood–you know, just stop trying. What was the point in going on? I would live out my remaining few days gnawing on the leg of the nearest display table, moaning in a fever of disappointment, and muttering things like, “Ham. She believed ‘ham,’” and “Why must you disappoint so?” I would phone my kids repeatedly and apologize for bringing them into such a world. I would cobble together whatever I could find on the floor, add the shards of table leg I would pull from my teeth, and create a collage that I would title as, My Despair. This would be my final Instagram post. My phone would then die and I would gnaw on that into my oblivion.

I wondered if perhaps this woman had slipped through the veil between our reality and some choice location in the multiverse where meat drinks are all the rage: 

“I’d like a hedgehog frappé, and my friend here would like a beef Wellington shake with a turkey shot in lard syrup.” 
“Would you like to upgrade both to feed-lot size, and get a free ptarmigan slushy? A lamb ice perhaps?” 

 How many more people like her were slipping through? Had they all had their humour replaced with dull-as-a-rototiller at birth? Was this where this most recent hatch of cement-headed politicians had come from? If she was mentally glacial enough to consider ham drinks, what else was she considering as truth during her day which in this present zeitgeist, could be anything–Doug Ford has a clue–that kind of thing. 

“No, it can’t be ham.” 

I weep.