TBT #92: The Watchers

We watch the people in the park while sitting on a cast-iron bench near a pigeon-stained statue of a noble man whose name I never learned. We’ve come there for years but I’ve never bothered to read his description on the plaque. The red bricks beneath our feet are inscribed with the names and messages of other, more mindful, people from the city, the ones that feel a sense of civic duty and charity and pride. They support endeavours like this park and other parks; we just sit and watch, feeling warm air on our faces, listening to the sound of birds, the blue sky above us drifts forever towards tall buildings and hillsides and other things far off.

The world goes by in technicolour. Early summer is like that. Winter ends and spring goes by and people finally are able to shed their bulky snow coats and slick raingear and revel in colourful ridiculous tacky things. Most move quickly, carrying briefcases and bags, balancing coffee mugs and fast food bags in their hands, looking uncomfortable in formal-wear. Others move more slowly, walking in pairs, draped in too many shopping bags, letting them hang off their arms like weeping willows. They’re often messes of cell phones and iPods, tangled in headphones and wires, drifting lightly over the sidewalk.

But then there are the ones that don’t move. The ones that pause and sit and stare up at the pigeon-stained noble man in bronze. These are the ones we focus on, sitting far back on our bench, my leg just barely touching yours, my arm resting behind your back.

“What about him?” I ask, pointing to a bald man with a halo of white thin hair. Wearing a drooping red polo shirt and brown pleated slacks, he looks around with lackadaisical intensity, surveying everything with interest but without focus.

“He just retired,” you start, trying not to look directly at him. “He worked for a long time and was a hard worker, but was never all that successful.”

“Yeah,” I concur. “It’s not that he wasn’t talented — he was great at his job — but he just never found his way up the ladder. Wasn’t cut-throat enough. But he was proud of what he did every day, and he’s proud to be retired.”

We watch as he nods and smiles as some shopping girls drift by his bench.

“Why do you think he’s here today?” I ask.

You don’t need to think long. “His wife needed to shop. He came along because he doesn’t really have anything else to do. She got tired of him following her around so she told him to go busy himself elsewhere. That she’d meet him in the park.”

This man is easy for me to read. “He’s going to be here for hours but he loves it. He loves every minute of this day. Later, when his wife shows up, she’ll ask him what he did, and he’ll tell her and so she’ll shake her head and sigh heavily. She thinks he wastes his time. He’s never been happier.”

You turn your head quickly when his eyes pass us by. “He has one kid. A daughter.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a sprinkler on in the grass behind us. It keeps steady time like a metronome. We sit and watch the man some more for a few cycles before moving on.

On the other side of the square two young guys meet. The one with the spiked hair has been waiting for a while. His friend in the hat has just arrived. They shake hands and sit on the same bench.

“You think they’re a couple?” I ask.

You’re caught off guard. “No, I think — No. They shook hands.”

“They seem pretty close.” Spiked-hair had his arm across the back of the bench, like I did.

“But they shook hands. You don’t do that if you’re together.”

“So what’s their story? Why are two guys in their twenties meeting in the middle of the day on a Tuesday? Shouldn’t they be at work?”

More hesitation this time. It’s harder to get the stories of the younger ones. There’s less definition on their faces.

“They’re old friends. Really old friends. They grew up on the same street, knew the same people, dated the same girls, went to the same schools…” You trail off.

“Like Shawn and Cory,” I add.

“Hah, yeah,” you say in deep focus. “But they’re done school now. And all of the people — all of the friends and girls that moved around them like satellites, that kept them centred — are gone. It’s just them now in this city.”

“The guy in the hat probably has a job. He’s just showing up now around lunch time. The other guy probably goes through three or four jobs a month. He can’t figure it out. He can’t find one that makes him happy. It all seems like so much bullshit to him.”

“Yes. And hat-guy has always been a bit more responsible. More studious. Spiked-hair is always telling him about how working is bullshit and how everyone he knows is an asshole and how he keeps getting screwed out of things that are rightfully is. And hat-guy just sort of nods and sighs, even though he has a good job and has met good people — he feels an obligation to his old friend. The last old friend he has.”

“Because spiked-hair was the one that taught hat-guy how to make friends, how to party, how to talk to girls, how to get laid.”

“But that was a long time ago now, and hat-guy can’t help but realize…”

I turn away from the two of them and look at you.

“Do you think they’ll be friends for much longer?”

You look at me with sadder eyes.

“No.”

We’re so similar, you and I on this park bench. Our words blend and merge, our thoughts converging like rain drops in a puddle, everything falling and coming together. We’ve always had this.

A man walks heavy into the square, holding a coffee cup in front of him. He’s older than the other two guys — probably in his early-30s. His hair has receded sharply so that his head serves as an arrow, pointing fiercely at all things. He stops in front of the statue, in front of the plaque, and just stands there, putting his free hand in his pocket.

“What about him?” I whisper.

“Shh. He’s close. I bet he has good hearing.”

“He seems kind of mad.”

You nod. “He’s one of those kind of guys. Mad at a lot of things. Look at him — he’s mad at his coffee.”

I watch as he takes a long hard sip then lowers the cup and looks into it.

I laugh. “Wow, he is. He’s just so pissed off at that coffee. He’s like ‘Fuck you, coffee, why are you so plentiful and delicious?’ He wants that shit to be done. He doesn’t want to be carrying this cup around with him any more. It’s insulting.”

“But he doesn’t want to just throw it out because he paid for it and it’s good and that would be losing.”

“He’s competitive.”

“Yes, but not in, like, an adult way. Not with sports and things. He’s weirdly competitive. He was that kid who was always calling stuff, you know? ‘I call front-seat!’ ‘I call goalie!’ ‘I call two slices of pizza!’”

“And he thought that was, like, the law! There was no getting away from that. He called it. You can’t break that.”

“He’d also be the one making up arbitrary rules in games. Like no-tagbacks and stuff. And now he’s pissed, because he can’t call things anymore. Nobody respects the call once you reach a certain age.”

“That was his peak, that age where kids are just calling stuff and making up rules for the games they play. He excelled there. And now he can’t go back.”

“He’s stuck.”

I think he heard us. He glances with a mean look and holds it for a few seconds before walking past the statue. He hovers the coffee cup over the garbage can on the edge of the square for a second before reconsidering, and keeping it.

There was a woman sitting near the content old man, reading a book. He kept glancing and smiling at her. Now she’s moving to another bench, careful to avoid eye contact, keeping the pages close to her face. Her hair is cropped short. She wears a conservative business suit. She wears glasses big enough to cover her thick dark eyebrows.

“Wow, she doesn’t get him at all,” I say, gesturing.

“She doesn’t really get a lot of things, I think.”

“She’s sad.”

“But she’d never admit to it. She’s not sad, she’d say. She’s happy. She has a good job. She has a husband. She has kids that aren’t drug addicts or criminals. She goes to church and volunteers. What does she have to be sad about?”

“But she is sad.”

“She’ll realize that later, when her kids are older and she has less to occupy her. She convinced herself early in life that this was the kind of life she needed to have. This is stable. This is safe. She doesn’t worry about failure.”

“She’s not a very good mom. Her kids are good and try hard to please her, but it’s never enough. She has girls too, I think.”

“Two girls. Older. And a son, still young. She’s nicest to him. The girls are always too fat or need hair cuts or better boyfriends or… you know. That stuff.”

“Her husband is another man who peaked in school. High school. He works hard and has a steady job. And he loves her more than anything, doesn’t he?”

“He does. And he doesn’t understand why she seems so unhappy.”

“He can’t talk about it with her. Because she doesn’t know she’s unhappy yet. She just thinks people are wrong.”

“One day it will hit her. She’ll call one of her daughters and try to nag them or whatever it is she does. And the girl will just, like, blow her off. The girl won’t need her any more. Then lady over there will know. She’ll realize that she made a 20-year-mistake. That she took a wrong turn in her life.”

The man is looking at her again, smiling softly. She buries her head deeper into her shoulders and into her book and pretends she doesn’t notice.

“Do you think she was an artist or a musician or something, before all of this?” I ask.

“No,” you answer too quickly. “I don’t think she was ever talented.”

The sprinkler keeps time. Birds tumble across the red bricks, chasing crumbs of bread and candy wrappers. The old man is still there and will be for hours. The two young guys have parted ways, the one in the hat hurried off as his friend with the spiked hair crosses his legs, puts on headphones and stares at the tree leaves above him. You and I just sit quietly, waiting for another person to enter into our square.

We’re more negative than we are positive but we never really discussed that. I wonder sometimes if other people do what we do, sitting in that square, and if anyone has ever judged us like we judge them. But then I look at you and think of the years, piling up like laundry. No one else does this. No one else is like us.

And so I grin and point to another person. The statue casts a tall shadow. The sky is on us now.