Lessons from a chance meeting with a young woman in a cafe

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS OUT early one morning, and I found a small cafe that still serves breakfast rolls to the early birds, though there are no queues now - no men in yellow jackets or building boots covered with yesterday's cement. The young Polish man behind the counter used to know them all by name, but he doesn't know where they all went.

I know his name. And I know that his daughter is in third class and has a part in the Christmas play and speaks with a Mullingar accent.

He is very proud of her.

I got talking to a young woman with a rucksack, sipping coffee by the window. Her mother had left her to the train for Dublin, where she's at college, but she missed it because she was combing her hair in the station washroom. So she decided to take a walk, and catch the next train.

It is unlikely that we would have spoken to each other at any other time of the day. She would be trapped in her own little world and I would be trapped in mine. A young woman and a middle-aged man is a poisonous cocktail, according to the ancestors. Though in the darkness before dawn, we were only shadows, so the possibility arose for each of us to escape our restricted worlds and have a little chat.

"I've seen you before," I said.

"Yes, I worked here last summer," she explained.

The remains of a breakfast lay on the table between us.

"I don't like waiting," she said, hugging her plastic cup of coffee with both hands, and gazing sideways out the window at a taxi man having an argument with a petrol pump.

I told her I'm always waiting.

"I wait for e-mails. I wait for letters. I wait for good news that I always believe is just around the corner. One of the pleasures of being a writer," I said, "is that you get lots of time to wait." "You're up early," she said. "I thought writers lay in bed most of the day, with hangovers from the night before." I said: "That's a tourist's idea of writers." She was fidgeting with the scarf around her neck.

But there was something sad about her. As if she was missing someone.

"The mornings are getting very dark," she said, still staring out the window. "I don't like the dark." I didn't bother telling her that such mornings remind me of my childhood when I was an altar boy in Cavan; my nostrils alert to candle wax, and my belly rolling with hunger in anticipation of a good breakfast, as old men and women shuffled into their pews, or muttered prayers to the Virgin Mary on the side altar, so loud that all their anxieties rattled around the painted ceilings. All that, might be too much information for a young woman, in these secular times.

So I asked her to let me freshen her coffee, a phrase I first learned from waitresses in American diners.

If I had said "Do you want another coffee?" she might have said no. But the phrase made her smile.

Asking permission to freshen her coffee, even at 7.30am, suggested the attention of a suitor who seeks to render some service to a goddess.

But a great actor once told me that only young actors should play the role of suitor; whereas older actors ought to seek rewards by playing the role of "the wise old man". And when I returned with the coffee, she had taken out a book with Business Management written on the front cover.

So I spoke wisely, and as softly as I could, declaring that a happy life sometimes depends on embracing the dark.

"Enjoy these short days! The cold wind, the flames in the fire, and the promise of snow! To hope for snow in November," I suggested, "is like dreaming about heaven in old age."

Her eyes lit up and she said that there was one thing she loved about early mornings when she was a child.

"My dad used to work night shifts in a factory," she said. "When he came home he would always cook breakfast for me, before he went to bed. I used to love that." "Does he not do it any more?" I wondered.

"No," she replied, very quietly. "He died."

mharding@irish-times.ie