I likely will never know what names they answer to. And the odds are I’ll never speak to those people to hear the real stories and how wonderfully wrong I was. Odds are, every detail I crafted was wrong - not even close, probably. They squint their eyes to see pictures of each other’s grandchildren, the children of sons and daughters they watched grow up themselves. They meet once a month now, here in the 21st century. Life swirled around them and the Earth kept threatening to tilt off its axis, but their living rooms remained a safe haven.
Newsbar new york city free#
The kids were at school now, the ladies free to meet on weekday mornings. They kept meeting as children grew and pencil markings moved upward on the doorframe. It became less about analyzing “Jane Eyre” and Maya Angelou and more about the best way to soothe colicky babies. A few years ticked by, and most of the book club meetings were spent ogling over newborn babies. The group of women continued meeting once every two weeks, now that their homes were fuller and regular duty had begun again. The book club survived even after wayward spouses returned with duffle bags slung over their shoulders, their sun-tanned cheeks waiting for a kiss from their love. They’re part of a book club they started in the ’60s while their husbands were overseas in Vietnam.
Likely, they’re a group of friends meeting for lunch. They look to be in their sixties, maybe seventies, based on the graying hair and creases in their faces from years of smiling in the sun. A group of women sit beside me, crowded around a wooden table cluttered with coffee-stained mugs.
The chiming of laughter to my left takes me off of the street and back into the coffee shop. “A man can’t think on an empty stomach,” she’d told him. Inside the briefcase, amid the clusters of papers and manila folders, is a granola bar, because his mom always told him to bring a snack. He did carry it that day, and he’s carried it every day since. It was a graduation gift intended to be carried on the first day of his first big-kid job. I decided that the briefcase isn’t just a briefcase, though. Maybe he’s heading to his big corner office on Wall Street. She grew up in the South where the early morning heat carried the scent of Bermuda grass through her open window, and it followed her all the way north.Ī man walks by with a briefcase a few minutes later. Inside that to-go cup is not coffee but freshly made matcha that is almost a perfect match to the green hue of her pants. The woman is wearing green pants because it reminds her of fresh-cut grass in the summer. The only kind of science I’ve found myself to be good at. Purely fictional - guesswork, really, based on my observations. She would keep walking, and I would stay seated behind the cafe’s window, and that would be the end of it. I would have only seen a woman wearing green pants walk by with a to-go cup of coffee in hand. When I used to people-watch, I merely saw. With a window looking out on University Place and a dining room underscored by smooth jazz, there is no shortage of eye-catching people. Newsbar is no Disneyland, but it’s a magical place in its own right. I had to know the stories behind it all, even if I needed to make them up myself. Just observing the clothes, the gait, the neon-colored hair or the tattooed arm was no longer enough. But as I grew and changed, so did the parameters of my people-watching endeavors. There were families in matching shirts, young kids messily devouring a Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream sandwich and a newlywed couple snuggled up watching the fireworks. Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth that I used to frequent, like many other Southern Californians, was the prime location for observations. People-watching has been a whimsical - albeit slightly invasive - habit I’ve had since I still had my baby teeth and believed in Santa Claus.
It’s my guilty pleasure, almost a vice, rather than the pricey lattes I shouldn’t buy and the cranberry muffin that I find dangerously delicious: people-watching. My thoughts float away from the task at hand and my eyes follow suit, drifting from the Google Doc to the cafe’s other patrons. Writing essays and struggling to finish physics homework that I will never fully grasp is my primary focus, but I’m human. My only indulgence is the $7 chai and the discounted day-old baked good I get at the counter. If a professor or my mother asks, I go to my unofficially owned table to do homework and nothing else. Staking my claim like I’m a miner in the Gold Rush comes naturally to me. It’s not mine, but I claim it anyway - the small, wooden half-bench-half-chair table tucked in the far corner of Newsbar on University Place.
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