Columbus Day Pt. 01

I met her because Columbus Day is a federal holiday.

I was sitting in my Starbucks on October 12, 2009, 517 years after Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas.

After weeks at sea, Columbus landed in the Bahamas in the early-morning hours of October 12, 1492. He knelt on the ground and kissed the Earth. He gave thanks to God. He was off course by thousands of miles, but he still found paradise.

As I sipped my coffee and proofread the page proofs in front of me, I was not aware that this particular Monday was Columbus Day. If I had tried to enter a bank or a post office that day, maybe it would have entered my mind.

Starbucks Westport is on the first floor of a twelve-story office building in Maryland Heights, Missouri. This Starbucks has beautiful, large wooden tables and good lighting. No drive-thru at this location. I can be found here most weekdays, from, say, 11 am to around 4:15 pm. Typically, I sit near a window, nursing a venti caramel macchiato while proofreading pages of a novel, a book on economics, or a self-improvement book.

On this particular day, I was proofreading a science fiction novel, a dystopian fantasy. The writing was top shelf. The editing was good, too. However, there were a few misspellings here and there. With the movement of my red pencil, I changed the figurative further to the literal farther. I decided to change "bare gut" to "bare abdomen." Then I read, "A woman screamed mutely in pain or grief..." Well, I thought, I'm not sure how one can scream mutely. Suddenly, I remembered the day—some seventeen years earlier—when I lifted binoculars to my face and saw a woman screaming, mutely, some seventy feet away, her voice silenced by double-pane windows and morning traffic fourteen floors below. Mutely. And then her head was shoved face first into a pillow on the hotel bed.

Maybe I will just query the editor on this point. Or maybe I should let it go.

"Hey there." A woman's voice, very close. I think I jumped. I looked up from my work. I placed my pencil next to my cup. A woman was standing at my table. She smiled. "That looks like fun," she said, and I noticed the Southern (Mississippi?) accent. "What are you doin'?" Her thick red hair fell around her neck, and I smiled as I took in her smile, her eyes. She wore a black, skin-tight t-shirt and blue jeans. She was in her late forties, maybe fifty, but very pretty. She was holding a paperback novel in one hand and venti-sized coffee in the other.

"I'm proofreading a novel. Science fiction," I said.

"I have always wanted to do that." She smiled, backed up two steps, turned, and walked to an upholstered chair twenty feet away. She sat down, placed her coffee on an end table, opened her book, crossed her legs, and read.

Was she flirting with me? I looked at my phone. 4:02 pm. Damn. I have to leave in 15 minutes to get to my other job. The job with the benefits. She lifted her head and looked at me for about three seconds. I tried to read the name scrawled on her cup. Fail.

I tried to read. At 4:15, I collated my page proofs, slipped a rubber band around them, and stowed my pencils and laptop. I picked up my backpack and walked to her.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

She looked up and smiled. "Hmm. It's sort of a romance-adventure." She paused. "I asked Josh, the barista, if you come in here often. He said, 'Mike? He's here all the time.'" She laughed. "I'm Patricia—Pat—by the way."

"Hi, Pat. Yes. I'm here most weekdays. Late morning to around 4:15. I have another job in the evenings. I have to leave in a minute." I paused. "I've never seen you here."

"I'm usually here after five—after work," she said. "Today is a federal holiday, so I came in early."

"Really? I mean, today is a holiday?"

"Columbus Day. The second Monday in October."

I looked at my phone: 4:16. "Unfortunately, I have to work on Columbus Day. Are you here on the weekends?"

"Sometimes. Have a good night at work."

I smiled. I turned and walked out of Starbucks. I got into my car, started the engine, and drove to my job at United Parcel Service. The job with great benefits that ruins my evenings.

***

During the day, I sort and re-sort words, putting letters, commas, periods, parentheses, verbs, nouns, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in the right order. A novel, a book, is simply a big filing cabinet.

At night, I sort boxes, packages. I am a part-time sorter at the UPS.

Tonight I am sorting boxes from the Scholastic Book Club. The unloader is in a 53-foot trailer that contains 8500 boxes of books. He is dropping the boxes on the belt at a brisk pace. He is consistently fast tonight, about one box every second. I toss a box addressed to Dallas TX 75241 to the tan belt. Houston TX 77041 goes to the black belt. Columbia, MO, tan. San Francisco, pink. Idaho, pink. Maine, grey. Kansas City, blue. Second Day Air package to Mississippi, gold. Atlanta, orange. St. Louis MO 63115, red. St. Louis MO 63141, green... Toss, toss, drop, toss, drop and kick, hook shot, toss...

"Hey, Mike." I look up. Ben the supervisor and his clipboard are headed this way. I push my iPod headband above my ears, and I continue to toss boxes.

"Mike, keep up the pace. You are doing great. The unload supervisor says you're doing twenty-five twenty for the first hour."

"You are actually admitting that I'm doing twenty-five hundred packages per hour?" I asked. "Then why do I see reports that show I am doing eleven hundred an hour?"

"Mike, eleven hundred is an average for this section. I can't spend my time counting packages per hour for everyone."

"Maybe you could count my speed for a minute, then multiply by, say, sixty."

"Yeah, maybe. Just keep up the pace."

I readjusted my headband. My iPod was pumping out disco tunes, dance stuff, Motown, Gaga, Pink Floyd. During the second half of my four-hour shift, I switched to an audiobook: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

At the end of a chapter, I turned off the iPod, thinking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Then I thought about the woman at Starbucks. Slim, tall, gorgeous red-auburn hair. She's a regular at Starbucks, so probably lives nearby. And she is off work today. So maybe bank employee? Government job?