Yesterday, I was sitting in a coffee shop people watching. Note taking. My best ideas come in coffee shops.
A couple, fifty-ish, well dressed in khaki, twinnish, empty pockets on their cargo pants,leather hiking boots,serious vests,marching purposefully in.
She held the table while he did the ordering. I was astonished when he brought back 1 XL coffee and 1 large Morning Glory muffin.
He then proceeded to empty half the coffee into a green reusable cup she hauled out from her Roots bag while she halved the muffin with a plastic knife. They then ate the shared repast.
I thought to myself: not in a million years would I do that. Never have I done that. How would you arrive at the stage in life where this would be de rigeur for outings? Does it imply an extraordinary intimacy? When would be the first time this happened? Did they do this for every meal, halving eggs and bacon, the BBQ, the sandwich? Do they have individual taste buds or have they just melded into one? How are they when invited to dinner parties? (Oh two plates, one dinner please!). They were remarkably trim and healthy looking. Didn't speak to each other all through the snack, and showed a complete lack of curiosity for anyone else in the cafe. Then again, am I the only one taking notes?
Another couple in the corner were obviously having an affair. He was feeding her bits of an outrageously pink pastry. Her dress was a matching pink with black slashes in the pattern, short and sparkly. Around 40. Black tights, black leather jacket, dyed black hair cut teenage style. asymmetrically. He was a rumpled mid-thirties, brown curly hair, looked in a hurry but kept reassuring her, between feedings, with his free hand on hers, pressing, begging. The wind had blown his comb-over off his small bald spot, but she was facing him so wouldn't have been privy to what I saw. At one point a tear leaked out of her eye, "I'll tell her, I will," he pleaded,a bit too loudly, "It's just not the right time with the baby coming."
Another couple, women, sat across from me. She was thin as a razor, her heavier friend brought the fixings, passing her a black coffee and setting a pastry and frozen concoction down for herself. She was the more animated, the friend nodding silently as she sipped her coffee. I only caught bits but it involved a husband at sea and a suspicion of an affair he was having with the ship's cook as she kept calling the house when he was on leave to tell him jokes. "Jokes?" said Razor,"Dirty jokes?" "The way he laughs, well, yeah." "I wouldn't like that." "Well, girl, I don't like it at all."
An ongoing joke in my family(Daughter and Grandgirl and I are such people watchers!) is we pretend we have highly personal printed questionnaires to pass out to strangers to avoid all this speculation and surmising. ("Let's get this over with, pass him the questionnaire!")
But that would spoil the fun of the passing parade.
