She isn’t here every night, though damn if she doesn’t arrive most nights around 9pm. Almost as tall as I am, which means she’s probably somewhere around 5′ 9″ — maybe 5′ 8″, I won’t pretend to be an expert on gauging height from a distance. But she pulls in most nights around 9pm.
It’s an unusual sight. Here she is, an old lady — honest to God she must be sixty-something — driving to Starbucks in a blue Mustang convertible. The roar of her engine echoes in the parking lot, coupled with headlights brighter than the Sahara sun. If the car itself had not drawn your attention, you’d imagine the driver of the vehicle to be a twenty-something able-bodied guy. Quite the opposite, this woman full of combed back silver hair steps out in black pants, a white cable-knit sweater, and flip-flops.
Fucking flip-flops.
In the real world there’s no backing music. Explosions don’t shoot out from the hoods of the cars in the background and Slash doesn’t descend from the heavens aboard a flaming pegasus. For all I know the woman may as well be playing Sade quietly in the borders of her own ocean blue powerhouse, but in my mind — and surely in the minds of everyone else — there’s an outpouring of utter badassery when granny arrives.
Like me, like the married couple that was in a few days ago, she’s a regular here. When she comes in, she comes prepared with her refillable oversized cup. I think she gets tea, but it’s hard to tell with the way she just hands over payment and her cup simultaneously, like she’s completing a drug transaction with the Colombian cartel. It’s quiet, it’s quick, and she hangs around long enough to exchange maybe a handful of pleasantries with the baristas behind the counter before getting back into her Mustang and going off to do whatever she does during the night.
Maybe she fights crime. Maybe she’s a real life Barbara Gordon, a retired Batgirl from the days of yore.
On this particular night she stays longer than usual. Her Starbucks card, as I understand, didn’t have as much money on it as she thought it did and was unable to pay the remaining balance. “We can fix that!” says the cashier, who immediately cuts her size on the point-of-sale system. Her size (and thus price) were cut, but they still refilled her cup to the brim. The old woman is grateful, but of few words. “I must have forgotten to refill it,” she starts, “I had a lot to do today.”
The cashier laughs and says she understands before telling the woman about how much she has to do all week, comparing their schedules as if the old woman really even cares. She doesn’t, at least it doesn’t seem so, in the way she replies with words like “Mmhm” and “Yeah?”
Eventually her cup comes back to her and she makes her exit stage right back to Badass Blue, something I’ve taken to calling her brilliant, blaring blue ‘Stang.
The People Watcher 