Margo's Dolphins

Socializing, Solitude, and How To Melt The Human Heart

“The Bulletin Board at Around” by Chris Buczinsky

As soon as Margo’s mother wheels Margo into the coffee shop, Margo sticks her head out of her stroller and says to me, “Dolphins! Dolphins! I want dolphins!”

I stop writing, and while Margo’s mother orders coffee, I crouch down beside Margo with my laptop and show her my screen saver—a pod of dolphins moving through blue water. One morning she caught sight of my dolphins, and now she wants my dolphins every morning.

While Margo watches the dolphins, Margo’s Mom and I chat about the difficulty she’s having potty training Margo. The baby dolphin prefers to release freestyle, into the open ocean of her diaper.

“Don’t worry about her,” I say. “Sooner or later, we all get there.” Most of us, I say to myself.

I open the door so that Margo’s Mom—with her coffee in her left hand and her labradoodle’s leash in her right—can push Margo’s stroller out the door without letting the whole maternal contraption roll into traffic.

Then I go back to writing, until the next customer enters, and I lift my head again to chat—with Mike, the Vet with two-kids, a crazy ex, and a new girlfriend who will play him in Mortal Combat.

With Chris, the mortgage broker who has just returned from Greece with photos of every stray cat in Athens.

With Joel, the fencing instructor who says he teaches kids “how to stab one another and yell properly.”

With Luz, the competitive body builder who feeds her son, Bradon, like she’s getting him ready for a stage appearance in the toddler bracket.

My morning writing session, therefore, often turns into a mixed write-and-chat affair. Just as words start to flow, a customer steps through the coffee shop door, and I stop writing and start talking, slipping without a hiccup from composition to conversation.

“Tickled by One’s Own Feathers” by Chris Buczinsky

Many writers I know are introverts; they border on shut-ins. When they are with others, they hang back and listen from a corner. They are Watchers. They need distance to grasp the human mind.

I am an Interactor. I need the nearness of people, the sparkle in another’s eye, the give-and-take of conversation to understand where the human animal is coming from. I have to be in the mix to understand the mix.

But creative work also demands a lot of solitude, so in the afternoon I want absolute isolation, and I become a shut-in too, tickled by my own feathers, which gives to my creative life a split personality.

At the coffee shop, I am a kindly Dr. Jekyll allowing everyone to interrupt me about anything. At home I am an intolerable Hyde, biting my wife’s head off if she so much as creaks the floor outside my studio door.

Every writer has to find his own unique way to marry the privacy of his own mind to the experience of others.

Hank Williams, the country music singer-songwriter, sometimes composed his songs in Alabama honky-tonks. As soon as he had written a verse, he’d play it for everyone at the bar and ask, “What do you think?” They’d suggest changes, and he would edit.

Karl Ove Knausgard, the Norwegian novelist, wrote a series of six massive autobiographical novels called My Struggle. In the privacy of his own home, Knausgard drilled into his own experience so deeply, with such raw honesty, that he hit the bedrock we all share.

Every writer finds his own way to the X that marks the spot where his own experience contacts everyone else’s. Try to do the job without both strokes of the X, and the work spins off into airy abstractions or sinks into self-indulgent navel-gazing.

“The Bellingham Village Green” from one of my sketchbooks

In a corner at Around, my Arlington Heights coffee shop, there’s a bulletin board for business cards so that people can advertise their services—real estate, piano lessons, lawnmower repair, mystical inner healing.

All of these business people are trying to make a contact, and that’s what I do as I chat with the customers. I make contacts.

It’s my trade as a writer and an artist. I give people an ear, a chance to unload a little of what’s on their minds, and in return they give me a little peek into their lives. With that peek, I make Tulipwood, my personal bulletin board of community experience.

It’s a win-win, as they say, a mutually profitable transaction, but my exchanges with my cafe friends go beyond the transactional.

Margo’s cry melts my heart. When she yells, “Dolphins! Dolphins!” and I take a couple of minutes to watch the pod with her, watch them weave through the blue with their powerful fins, leaping and spinning in the spindrift, something amazing happens.

In this moment of mutual wonder, when we witness together the power, grace, and beauty of the Creation, I too want to cry out to all the adults waiting on line for their lattes, “Dolphins! Dolphins!”

Isn’t that the holy grail of creation? Isn’t that what writers—all of us, really—long for: to witness the wonder together and melt our cold, cold hearts?

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