Coffee Shop Time Warp

Over winter break we took our three kids to a favorite coffee spot for hot chocolate.  As we settled in, I found myself more interested in “people-watching” and couldn’t help but notice the family sitting across the room:  parents and their four twenty-something kids.  There was Dad, bespectacled and reading.  Sitting beside him was his slightly-grunge son wearing Buddy Holly-style glasses and playing on his phone.  Mom was sitting at the other end of the table, talking with her stylishly-dressed daughters.  Another son, with All-American features was in seated in the middle, partaking of his coffee and alternating between conversation and looking over his brother’s shoulder at the smart phone screen.  They looked like a family enjoying a holiday away together, nothing more.

But yet, I was intrigued by their presence.  Now I’m not a great judge of age but I would say the parents were in their mid-to-late fifties and the kids in their mid-twenties. My math skills being far better, I figured that would be a thirty-year spread in age between the two generations.  These were “older” parents, much like my husband and me in that we started our own family in our thirties.  This family could be ours in another ten years; our corner of the coffee shop was present day and theirs 2025.

As my eyes wandered from face to face and interaction to interaction at their table my mind wandered as well, transforming this family into mine, another decade from now.  My oldest, clean-cut and blonde, would certainly be the one watching his ever-tech-obsessed brother playing on his phone.  My own style-conscious daughter a carefully-groomed hybrid of the two girls, her hair straight and long and neck adorned with a beautifully-tied scarf.  My husband, not unlike the father at that table, reading.  Me chatting with my daughter about, well, most anything.

I couldn’t help thinking how happy and comfortable they looked, being together.

And I smiled to myself, feeling tearfully reassured.