scenes from a coffee house

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, I’m an inveterate people watcher.

I mean, I guess we all are to some extent, but over the years, I’ve come to realize how much I enjoy watching others just going about their lives—and not like a creeper, just an offshoot of my curiosity. (I do have a track record in that regard.) And there’s no better place to creep … er, watch folks that than in a coffee house, especially if you’re stuck there for a few hours on a rainy Saturday morning.

As I’m typing this sentence, it’s Saturday, March 3, 2012, at 11:13 a.m., and I’m sitting in Koffee in New Haven, Connecticut …

[Before I go too far—one of the things I love about writing is that no matter when that previous sentence is read, be it tomorrow, next week, next year or a century from now by the beings from Zeta Reticuli, it will always be March 3, Koffee will always be open, and I will always be alive and sitting here pecking away at my keyboard. It’s an amazing state of existence. If something from a book bothers you, say like [spoiler alert!] how Snape kills Dumbledore, all you have to do is go back to page one of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Dumbledore lives again. Every fiction book on every shelf is packed with characters in suspended animation, and all you have to do is pick up the book and start reading to bring them to life. Just cool!]

… and I’m surreptitiously watching the world go by.

Koffee is one of my favorite spots, ironic since I don’t drink coffee under any circumstances—I sate my caffeine addiction with Coke, the most healthy way of going about it. [*lalalalalala I can’t hear you*] Nonetheless, I have ruined the Koffee experience a bit for myself in another way.

For the past few years, I’ve whiled away many Saturday mornings here, waiting as my son has attended his theater class down the street. Aside from being a nice two-hour block of reasonably quiet time to enjoy my own thoughts (a rarity, as anyone with children knows), and a wonderful people-watching perch, I like to treat myself to one of their ginormous chocolate chip muffins, which are decadently loaded with chips.

It’s become one of my guiltiest pleasures—trying not to consume a muffin in under five minutes, but always failing miserably. In my appreciation, during one of our “Best of Connecticut” meetings at Connecticut Magazine, I suggested that Koffee’s muffins be considered best in the state. The editorial staff agreed and Koffee was awarded “Best Muffin” for 2011.

And I screwed myself.

I used to drool just standing in line, looking at a bunch of them sitting in the glass case, wondering which one was going to be picked for my ravenous consumption. But once they were proclaimed “best” by a magazine that reaches over 300,000 state residents a month, a (not-so-) funny thing happened: People started eating them. Which meant by the time I showed up on Saturday mornings, the case was almost always devoid of them.

The cruelest cut happened about a month ago—after weeks of going without, I got to Koffee and saw there was a single chocolate chip muffin sitting there. I looked at the line in front of me—one woman, who had already ordered, and one guy. I started to smile. I was going to score!

The guy in front of me gets to the register. “Give me a large coffee, black,” he says, and I start to exhale—

“… Oh, and that last chocolate chip muffin.”

DRATS! DRATS! AND DOUBLE DRATS!

My wife remedied this for me on Valentines Day, going to Koffee early and buying every chocolate chip muffin in the place. She brought them home, and even though we froze them, they were gone quickly—what I get for sharing with the kids!

Stupid kids, always eating and growing and stuff …

Anyway, after the muffins, my next enjoyment is to just sit here and observe while I write. As New Haven is a college town and college students enjoy the java, there’s always a lot of them here. Even though I’m about three times their age, I almost fit in with my shiny MacBook Pro—a quick glance around and it seems as though everyone under the age of 30 has one. And an iPhone, of course.

[*insert harp version of the marimba tone as Steve Jobs looks down from iHeaven*]

There’s a distinguished looking gentleman and his tween son that I’ve seen in here numerous times over the past few years, and I always try to imagine their lives at home. I picture them sitting around, sipping iced tea, playing chess and enjoying intellectually stimulating discussions—you know, the direct opposite of my relationship with my sons, which involves lots of bodily noises, chaos and smart alecky comments. “Hey Dad, how long was it before your family finally got fire?”

Sigh.

I also often see two scholarly looking gentlemen whom I assume are professors—they doodle what look to be complex formulas on notebooks, and students approach them respectfully from time to time to chat. I would bet these guys have been going to coffee houses since Bob Dylan used to play them, and I would also bet their students have no idea who Bob Dylan is, other than maybe “the father of that guy who used to sing ‘One Headlight.'”

Around are also parents of other children who are in the same theater class as my son. If I wasn’t so shy, I’d try to strike up a conversation; instead I sort of give a smile and nod when we make eye contact. You know, which isn’t any more creepy than the average middle-aged white guy trying to give candy to kids at the playground….

Speaking of eye contact, I really try to avoid it while people watching—I’ve sort of mastered the art of looking at someone, and if they look up, pretending that I was lost in thought and looking off in another direction….

Yeah, smooooooth. Like gravel.

Obviously, a lot of the students here are doing homework, something that would have never worked for me back in the day. Not that I had ADD, but I was easily distracted back in the day and it was amazing that I was even able to earn a degree (although it was in communications, the basket-weaving of academia). Even now, I can barely concentrate on my laptop long enough to string together three—

Sorry, had to check on The Bloggess. And Twitter. And Facebook. And the Jets Blog. What was I typing about again?

Oh yeah, watching people. I guess some might think it’s an invasion of privacy, but is it my fault that that they’re sitting right out here in public? Fair game, I say. You know, like those who leave their curtains open at night practically begging you to look in …

Okay, that’s more than borderline creeper. But I learned the hard way to be careful what you ask for.

Like every single heterosexual adolescent boy—from the kids in Porky’s to Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window—I always dreamed of “accidentally” catching a glimpse of a sultry female neighbor in the act of getting changed. Of course, I never actively pursued it, just thought it’d be cool if I ever got to see it somehow. The details were vague, just a fantasy, right?

It was a cold winter night a few years ago. I was crunching through the snow down the darkened street to retrieve my young sons from their friends’ house, when suddenly I was bathed in light from the house I was passing. I turned to look at the source, which was my neighbor’s bedroom window, and there, standing completely nekkid, was my neighbor!

I froze for a second, and in that second, my damned eyes recorded much more detail than I wanted. Although I know she couldn’t see me (it was still much darker outside than it was inside, and the window was closed, so all she would’ve seen was a reflection of herself) and I know I was doing nothing wrong—I was standing in a public street, the window was unfettered and the light was on—I nonetheless turned and ran before I saw anything else.

For the record, there’s nothing wrong with the neighbor, it’s just for my personal fantasy to be fulfilled, she would have been about 40 years younger and about 100 pounds lighter. Simply, I dreamed of Phoebe Cates, and instead got Kathy Bates. The perils of people watching.

The universe isn’t completely capricious, however. I did snag the last chocolate chip muffin at Koffee this morning.