People Watching

People Watching

I’m not totally sure why I associate people watching with Europe and Mediterrenean culture. I have images of people sitting in a park in Paris, on benches maybe, observantly watching one another. I have a harder time envisioning Americans doing this, probably because many of us, outdoors, are staring into handheld screens.

There is something about watching people instead of television that is restorative. To watch people, its good to be in a place where people are about, preferably engaged in a broad range of the activities of living. People watching in a park is good. Or in a bustling metropolitan section.

We lived in Beirut, in Lebanon, for a year, and there was a Russian café called Modka, now sadly defunct, which was the best people watching spot in the world. Modka looked like a UFO, this modernist Russian box, all curving polished chrome, architecturally anomalous in that place, and was surrounded by outdoor seating that hugged the sidewalk of the busiest intersection in a neighborhood called Hamra, which was an axis of intersection between Muslim and Christian Beirut. What this meant was that you were as likely to see someone walk by in a halter top as in a burka. Modka had waiters wearing tuxedos, and it served arabic coffee in two little carafes, one filled with milk. You could order a plate of hummus or Mutabbal (baba ghanoush), and they would serve it with a garnish of chopped radish, cucumber, tomatoes, parsley, and slabs of pita bread, but you didn’t come for the food, even though the food was delicious.

You came to sit outside, on the street, in the slight wash of petrol fumes, the sunlight and the heat, the honking of horns, and the cosmopolitan crush of the world walking by. Everyone walked by the corner at Modka. Old men sat about on stoops, exchanging news, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes. Cab drivers leaned out windows, gabbing with passersby. Fashion models and Russian prostitutes strutted past, tall and gangly, wearing candy-colored lipstick, picking their way across the street in three-inch heels like strange exotic birds. Sometimes a delegation of businessmen from the Gulf in dishdishas floated past. Lebanese aunties out doing their shopping, a basket over one arm, a child in tow. Motorbikes wove in and out of traffic, and flocks of trained pigeons wheeled overhead, in a flurry of wings, dropping an acoustic contrail of dense flapping sound behind them. Street children would appear suddenly, a hand outstretched, asking for a dollar. A Syrian day laborer would pass with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. From across the street wafted the smell of felafel, and the smell of burgers grilling. Occasionally the breeze picked up and you could smell the sea. Someone was shouting. Five stories up, the roofline bristled with satellite dishes and strange insectile antennae, but at ground-level, it was all about people in every direction.

Sitting there, you never knew who or what you might see. Humanity walked past, alternately in glory and bedraggled. Beauty, and tragedy. Babies, and the greatly aged, stooped over, moving so slowly down the street that young people swirled around them like the currents of a river around a rock. Young lovers leaning into one another’s arms paraded past.

There was so much beauty in all of this motion. People in the heart of the city were doing something, most of the time, headed somewhere, and so they passed by Modka mid-stride, and you got to see them in the verb of themselves, in action.

Some people held their heads high, and some were worn down by years. Some waddled down the street, and others skipped. People laughed, sang, wept, and begged. Some performed themselves, others were too tired, or too vulnerable to expend energy on that. A great photographer could have sat there all day long snapping portraits that revealed character.

The moment that a middle-aged woman stopped to dab at her brow with a handkerchief, a collection of plastic sacks hung over her left arm, and you could almost see the flat she would return to, see her turning on the propane gas under the kitchen burners, see the beans soaking, see her chopping vegetables as she gazed out a small window, only half-seeing what was in front of her, thinking about her children, both grown now, who had moved to Paris, and Brasil.

There was the tall blond model in a mini-dress, stopping midstride to remove–what was it, a tiny rock? that had gotten wedged into her heel, cantilevered down to adjust her ankle, and the group of adolescent boys who happened to be walking toward her, suddenly craning their necks in unison, excited as puppies, trying to look down her shirt, the group of them on the cusp of having facial hair, of getting to or having to shave. All of them high on the spring day, high on their own adolescence, their camaraderie, their own burgeoning sexuality, this yearning, this longing, this desire that was really spiritual in nature, a longing for initiation, a lust for life. There was something timeless about this: Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, surprised bathing. And she doesn’t realize they are looking at her until she straightens and looks up, and they, exploding with laughter and also embarrassment, to be seen wanting so nakedly in broad daylight, splinter around her and dash away. But the look she gives them, a knowing look, first surprised and then steely, says everything about men, and what she has seen in her time, though there is no way she is older than twenty. Says that she knows, better than they do, where all of this is heading: the full catastrophe of the world, of desire.

A thousand instances like this, precise jewels of moments. And for an astute observer, someone really paying attention, there is an entire education here; a crash course in human character, in human yearning, out here on the corner, available for the taking.