Table 2

The following is my journal scrapings from after the second table session. I hadn’t yet started the habit of writing about the experience from a perspective of reflection separate from my normal daily journal. At this point in my life — not so long ago, and not too dissimilar from today — I didn’t create the space or time to do the proper writing of the experience. I try to write three pages a day, a strategy I picked up from my halfway complete run at The Artist’s Way. The best days are those where I write three pages of journal and create the time to catch up on my reflections and internalize the lessons, but that is not yet every day. I’m building towards the habit by clinging to small victories, and publishing these reflections regularly is a habit I am working on now, so, I will publish this with the understanding there is a lot of room to improve, and then I’ll be off for my twenty-first or second table time. Without further delay:

This is day two of tabling. I’ve gotten more thank you’s and less conversation. Well, yesterday was really just one. And a comment. Today is mostly comments. It's entirely comments. …to pick up where I left off, I am at the beach now and it is nearly two o clock by my estimate. I’m about a page and a quarter into my three pages for the day and I have Oren Sofer’s book in my bag. I am experiencing a woman trying to feed the birds.

“Do you have more food?” she asks the man who she is with, “I just told them in Spanish we have more food.”

“I don't think the birds speak Spanish,” he says.

“Pajaros. Parjaros. Aki. Aki. Very good,” she coos.

She gets a bag of Ritz Crackers from the man and tells him that they like Ritz Crackers more than French Fries, then goes to scatter them around the parking lot.

The man comes to me and says, “It’s okay, she’s drunk.”

I said something like, “She’s not hurting anyone and having fun.”

“C’mon people,” she says to the birds.

“They’re birds, not people,” he says to the woman.

A man with long hair and a bucket of breadcrumbs approaches and ‘salt baes’ the flock of pigeons, which have just flown in. He is demonstrating trust to the woman in a warm, teacherly way. He says he does this every day.

So this is what is going on. We’re now waiting to see how this goes. There. A bird landed in his hand. He’s holding one. That bird is the get. The woman is comparing him to Jesus.

A man on a bike blasts through and scatters all the birds. The Jesus-like man is not disturbed. It seems like he’s dealt with this before. The birds have a lot going on. The birds part for the man as he goes back to his car.

At this point the woman comes over to me and says, “Really, do you? Do you want to hear it?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“No, you don’t. You’re not equipped to hear it. We’re out,” she gets on her bike to leave and turns back, “But I’m totally in awe of what you’re doing.”

Now they bike off. So I am a page in and I’ve had a fairly limited experience. We’ll see if sitting by the beach is the way to go.  What about a sign that says “No advice. Just conversation.”

I have a bit of a headache. It's sunny here down at the beach. Erick called me to hang out at the beach and I told him I was down at the beach with my listening table. He relayed this to some people on his side of the line, “He’s down at the beach with his listening table. Uh huh.”

I loved hearing that.

A walking man stopped to ask me what I'm doing and I told him. He said he is a therapist and his son teaches communication skills at the University of British Columbia. He asked what I charged, and I said I don't charge anything. He said good for me and walked on. It was a pleasant encounter.

People walk by. Someone said “It's so cool,” so that's a good start. It seems this location is decent at best. Saturday afternoon on the bike path is more or less a place people pass through. I could incentivize people with some money, but I’m pretty sure that’s defeating the point.

I had another person come by and talk to me! Well, just tell me they liked what I was doing and we leveled about communication skills and that was it. We just leveled and she went off and biked away. I feel quite good about it. I would be keen on doing the book reading once I get to the end of my three pages. It gives me pause that I was able to overcome my best intentions and sink three rounds of morning Fortnite into my . . . what I’m trying to build into a powerful life style. I didn’t even come away with dub (short for double-u, which is short for win, which I never get anyway). We are out here. This time is well spent. So that is a beautiful thing. Maybe I’ll get a smaller table that I could fit on my bike.

Here we are! I’ve now had a wonderful communication. A young woman with a unique name. I think it’s probably best to keep names… private? What’s the harm. This was a good question and answer time. She pulled her bike over and had many questions for me, which I was happy to answer. Then she talked about herself. It was her last year of college at LMU and she had gotten a job somewhere that would take her out of California, so she was enjoying the bike ride along the beach and soaking in the beach. She told me about some mixed feelings. Yes, she gotten a job, a real one, but it wasn’t what she ever imagined. She was a poet and a songwriter and there was some sensibility that by taking this job, she was closing a door to the lifestyle that she always wanted. My words, not hers. She asked to share a poem with me and I was all too delighted to accept…

It was a beautiful poem full of descriptive adjectives and colors that painted a picture of a young woman sitting on the beach watching the sun go, wondering about her future. It felt very personal, and it was very very special for me to listen to it. I applauded when she was finished.  

She asked if she could read one more poem and I said absolutely. So she read it and, if my memory serves me (which it doesn’t, because I neglected to write this reflection when it was fresh in my head), it was beautiful story about a boy who played guitar. I applauded again. She thanked me for being there and said that she may write a poem about me, and, if she saw me again, she would share it. And then she biked off.