Observations from a Park Bench

Has anyone seen the American Express commercial featuring Manoj Night Shyamalan? In it, the director waits in a crowded café simply observing the odd people and events around him, fueling his story ideas with the quirks of real life. Walking in to town for lunch on this fine brisk day, I observed some characters as well.

I passed by ol' Willie setting down his newspaper on a park bench and unwrapping his sandwich. I don't know if that's his name, but when I see people regularly without actually meeting them, I tend to assign them names. Come to think of it, the learning disabled mailroom guy with the blinking red light on his cart in my office was also “Willie” in my mind, as many times as people said his name was “Charlie”. Ol' Willie might not be all that old, but with his long white mane, Gandalf-like beard, and Stan Lee sunglasses, who can tell? Any time of year, for the past six years I've been at my company, a walk into town at lunch guarantees an Ol' Willie sighting.

In the supermarket where I picked up a slamming slice of pizza, an iced tea, and a side of fries, I went to the register of Gertrude, a kindly old German woman with a hint of an accent and a staple of the establishment. Again, I'm assigning a name although in hindsight I'm sure I could have checked her name tag. She's nice if slower than the other clerks, but I'm a patient man. After her third or seventh unsuccessful attempt to scan a nonexistent barcode on the bottom of an aluminum pizza plate, she wandered away with my lunch, fortunately stopped by a younger manager who told her to “just punch in the hot food combo”.

As I sat on a bench outside enjoying my hot slice of pizza, I marveled at my ability to get tomato sauce on my new jeans even holding a dish under my food. The fact that I myself was a quirky character in someone else's lunch story didn't keep me from continuing my observations. Like clockwork, the blind or partially blind pedestrian soon crossed my path with her wonder dog, his claws clicking on the stones as he walked gingerly over my feet, sniffing in my vicinity once before loyally leading his mistress onward. I'm not a dog person, but that is one GOOD dog. I've seen the woman in local eateries with the dog sitting at attention, not bothering anyone or trying to take food.

Suddenly, the silence was broken by the unmistakable gibberish and folderol of Shaggy's “It Wasn't Me.” I looked up from my cold fries to see a large SUV stopped before the pedestrian crosswalk. At the wheel was a conspicuously white lawyer/businessman with expensive shades and a suit to match his rolling boom box. I wondered what Jeremy Piven was up to before he drove onward, shooting a dirty look at the pedestrians that dared break his rhythm.

A mother stopped in front of me, turning to usher on her twin red-haired girls in matching green dresses and orange caps. As a woman in a black truck waited for the trio to cross in front of them, I heard the mother tell her children, “It's okay if people wait for us.”

As I sipped the last of my tea, I realized overladen-backpack-courier-lady, another neighborhood regular, wasn't going to show. I got up and took the long, leisurely way back to work, passing other-creepy-guy-sitting-on-a-bench-watching-people. Of course we both avoided eye contact. Finally, I sprinted across the main road back to my building, narrowly avoiding ”If I hit you it's because you're too slow”-turning-guy. I paused in the parking lot by the four traffic cones that, for the last three weeks, have blocked four spaces under a tree with a broken branch hanging by some other branches. Getting a ladder or a long stick or a rope seems like a good idea to me, but our maintenance staff's plan of blocking off the spaces and waiting for the wind or gravity to take care of it may yet pay off. I deliberately stood shaking my head, hoping people looking out of windows in the building would register my incredulity and realize the illogic of their ways. Sometimes we sleepwalk through this world, and a lot of problems can be solved if we'd just stop to look at each other.