Eyes

Alch and his wife, walking by on their way to the Harbor ferry, saw me through the thick glass fronting the lobby of my building. We stood face to face, he and I, on either side speaking and gesticulating. Couldn't hear anything, understand anything, so I came out and we greeted each other warmly. 'I've seen you around here,' he said, though we've hadn't seen each other for at least a year even living in the same neighborhood. 'I'm on a grand jury and I saw someone running by and said, 'Hey, that's...''

So, are we ever unobserved? Surely sometimes. But do we know for sure when we're not seen? Seldom, I think. The world is full of eyes moving left and right like searchlights, sometimes snooping, but sometimes aimlessly looping, and seeing what they was not looked for.

A world full of looking. Birds and squirrels give us the once over. Strangers' eyes slide right over us after evaluating what's required to avoid collision. Eye contact, look hooking look, is promptly broken. We gaze over someone's shoulder when we have to interact. People watching, a favorite activity, fixes on no favorites.

Yet, sometimes we do see someone we recognize, or take note of, adding that person to one of the open structures of significance we carry floating in our minds. People I've seen for instance, as I run day after day, going through a cycle of recovery from injury. Good for you. Twosomes I've seen sometimes together, sometimes apart. Why? Sometimes there's lifted hand that could be just the normal swing of the arm but isn't.

The improbable happens more often than expect because more things happen than we realize. All the many things that defy the odds are part of the lotteries of occurrences played every second for each person. So Alch, you gazing out the window of a grand jury room a few minutes to nine some morning, thinking perhaps of where you'd rather be, glancing down, see a fellow in tanktop bustling by and think, 'Hey, that's...'

Then luckily you were looking through the glass into the building just at the moment when I'd left the elevator and turning a corner. Seeing you, I was reminded of pleasant conversations we'd had in the past, and wondered why we haven't had more. The luck of this looking may still linger.