Teresa's Mosaic Café

"Hello, my friend!"

It was my friend, Teresa.

The chairs are all burnt orange, and every table-top
is a whimsical mosaic nursery rhyme,
a barely-controlled story from Gabriel García Márquez,
not a hundred years of solitude, but of a gathering.

Once, in Iowa, I visited from town-to-town--
of English and German and Norwegian and Irish heritages--
watching related genes imitate themselves.
Whole small towns of people all looked alike,
not necessarily to their mutual benefit.

There was a blond woman in the Mosaic Café:
in Minnesota that might have suggested
that there was only one customer, but at the Mosaic
it meant that America was a Mosaic,
and that blond is a sometime color.

There were women with genuine gray hair
overlaid with a sun-bleach of blond, and men
with beards as white as the tablecloths Teresa does not have.
At an adjacent table, a chocolate woman with brown eyes
and white teeth talked to someone from an Iowa town.
Four men, serious beyond necessity, who had hitched
their dusty pickups at the rail, talked cattle and feed.
Mayan and Aztec faces bridged the centuries.
Two Black men laughed and watched the woman
who patted tortillas into shape without a plan.

Alfonso moved down the bar and asked, "Was everything OK?"

"Everything," I said, "was much more than OK."

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