Chaos and Coffee Spoons

Two years ago, I heard the metallic clink of tiny coffee spoons against porcelain reverberate through a cafe in downtown Florence; the espresso machine, operated with fast, frantic precision, filled the looming frescoed ceilings with high pitched squeals. I fidgeted with two euro coins in hand as I stood in a crooked line, bothered by the inconsiderately animated conversations around me, the elderly people squinting their eyes haltingly to discern the glossy glass dessert case contents, and the wonderstruck tourists who took up too much of the limited space.

As usual, the jokes and small talk exchanged between cafe patron and cashier held up the line and made the transaction most inefficient. But having grown up partly in Florence, coffee is a religious affair, and ever since I can remember, this crowded cafe has remained one of my family and friends’ favorite gathering places. So as always, I waited.

I can be impatient, though. I can recall too many times that I hurried through the ritual to rush into the pristine emptiness of the piazza, to break from the noisy bustle — even though it was this wonderful chaos I would come to miss the most.

A few waves of pandemic out, I regret my irreverence. I should’ve listened closer to the coffee spoon clinks calling strangers, friends, and family to gather. Treating these endangered moments of connectedness and noise and chaos as a duty rather than a privilege, I squandered the tiniest, most wonderfully insignificant moments.

I feel this sensibility more than ever now, as I’ve witnessed cafes in post-pandemic Florence grow quieter. The welcoming clinks no longer ring out from open doors and street corners, but rather echo occasionally from behind thick, beige-walled apartment buildings. Ever since the lockdown started last year, the clinks have mostly been replaced with the muted shuffle of paper takeaway cups. These antiseptic units usher customers in and out of the cafe quickly. They make coffee appear most unnatural in the hand of an Italian — someone who has internalized devotion to the sanctity of a singular moment of pause that can come in a porcelain cup.

One year ago, I visited the cafe for one last time before a complete lockdown, before it would close indefinitely for the first time since World War II. This time, with no line, I proceeded all too quickly. Soft jazz music, ordinarily drowned out by voices, played overhead — a sound too cinematically and uncomfortably fitting. I could see the glistening marble countertops too clearly — the same ones usually covered by leaning arms and gesturing coat sleeves. The bottles of liquor at the bar were arranged too neatly. Like the emptiness of Piazza Duomo or the perfect stillness of Piazza della Signoria, everything was too quietly flawless and statically beautiful. The coffee tasted better when we sipped rubbing elbows with strangers, overhearing snippets of the lives we would probably never come to know.

I felt the loss of the old coffee ritual so deeply because chaos colors the lives we live. The tangential moments we share and the small unimportant things matter. And in the face of big, uncontrollable things, they matter even more.

Months later, I visited Harvard hoping that being physically on campus might somehow fill the college-shaped void in me. But without shouts across the Yard, or the shuffle between lectures in Sanders, or even the whirring threat of nearly getting run over by a scooter, the millions of tiny red bricks and the still gaze of John Harvard offered little solace.

This year, returning to life on campus finally hushed that silence. Off Zoom, it’s easy to appreciate the tangibles that make Harvard a special place: the resources, the academics, the beautiful Houses we inhabit. But what makes it truly alive are the moments we bring into its spaces. It’s the way we live in them. The way our conversations flow from common rooms to dining halls or the debates that keep us up too late at night. It’s the sound of us and all our passions, the continuous Cambridge traffic background noise included.

While distanced from Harvard, I found that, oddly, I was as nostalgic for the good, serendipitous moments as the messy, even distressing ones I encountered while on campus. The good and the bad of chaos, inextricably intertwined, cannot exist one without the other. But in the silence, it felt like neither. And as the pandemic waxes and wanes, the sounds come and go — but when I do hear them now, I listen a little more closely, maybe just a little more patiently, too.

Each sound is a heartbeat, and when they become more frequent, they create a pulse. Or maybe each sound is the ticking of a clock. Things change around us, but the clock keeps on ticking, time keeps passing, and for better or for worse, everything keeps on going. It is at once unnerving and comforting to realize these moments are all we really have. And if that’s the case, then we should appreciate them all the more — for all their color, chaos, and wonderful insignificance.

Serena G. Pellegrino ’24, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Lowell House.