Your Kids Are Animals
and other things I learn from my barista
I am fond of a barista at the Starbucks near my office. I’ll call him Devon. He is around 25, with thick, dark brown hair swept to one side and a light beard. In a friendly group of baristas he’s one of the friendliest, always asking me questions that go beyond “how’s your morning going?” but not in a creepy way.
Once in a while he’ll tell me that he likes my earrings; once he said, “you always look so put together.” I don’t usually feel put together, so I’ve held onto that comment, like a lucky penny. I suppose there’s a chance that Devon learned to talk this way with customers at some kind of Starbucks training camp, but there’s no tip jar at my Starbucks, so he’s not doing it for the money.
Today, in conversation with Devon while I ordered my iced Americano, I told him my kids were at camp this week. “Like boot camp?” he asked, sort of joking. “No, they’re at zoo camp,” I replied.
There’s an “employee spotlight” poster on the wall at the Starbucks. This month it features Devon. It says his hobbies are eating, sleeping, and making beats, or something like that. I like sleeping and eating, too, but I would not say they are my hobbies. Things I do to stay alive, maybe. Things I aspire to do more, and less, of. The fact that Devon claims these activities as hobbies makes me think that we lead very different lives.
“Oh, zoo camp,” Devon said, looking serious. “Right. Because kids are animals.”
I laughed a little because I could tell Devon thought the “animals” at zoo camp were my children, and all the children whose parents pay for them to attend, rather than actual lions and tigers and bears. Kids can be wild, I guess. Certainly a different species from a 25-year-old barista who, when he’s not dealing with people like me, mainly sleeps, eats, and makes beats.
Maybe Devon imagines there is a campsite somewhere in Portland, a sweeping savanna with a few well-placed watering holes, where children are set loose on summer mornings to run and grunt and roar at each other. Around noon, a keeper throws some fish at them or refills their troughs with grain. At 4 o’clock, a long queue of SUVs forms, stretching from the edge of the savanna all the way to the Hwy 26 on-ramp. Then all of the mom-and-dad animals — the grown-up giraffes and bears and sea otters, drumming their paws and hooves on their steering wheels while they wait — gather up their offspring and schlep them home.
I tried to correct Devon’s impression, as the espresso machine scraped and whirred beside us. “The kids are at the zoo,” I said. “It’s called Zoo Camp because it’s at a zoo.”
Devon smiled kindly, almost indulgently. While he and I both reside on Planet Friendly, we live in different zip codes. We connect on most mornings because we both try. But these kinds of connections only go so far. I could tell from his reaction this morning that he thought this whole zoo camp/Zoo Camp contrast I was making – it wasn’t a real thing. I was just the nice lady from the office building next door, making a distinction without a difference.
Thirty minutes later, I sip my iced Americano 12 floors above where Devon stands behind his counter, probably complimenting someone else’s earrings. I am positive that he is not thinking about my children, galloping through zoo camp, roaring and snorting at the other animals. But I am thinking about him, because he made my day.
