Coffee shop ...

He's reading his book out loud, quietly, a murmur really. His voice is soft and measured. He's seated, hands clasped, his body leaning and hunched over his book which sits open in front of him on a small table. He's sitting in one of those comfortable chairs of which there are always too few in coffee shops. Every now and then he sits back and seems to consider the passages he's just completed, speaking now to the book instead of from it. I imagine he's challenging it or asking it for clarification as if he's in a two way conversation with a pupil. I say pupil because I associate him with my notion of a university professor. He's older, perhaps in his sixties with a full head of curly greying hair, a bushy, equally greying mustache and simple framed glasses perched on his nose. He has a note pad unopened on the table and an uneaten croissant, which I assume he has purchased as the price of admission. He's dressed casually in jeans and a clean pressed shirt; all of these details seem to reassure me that he's only eccentric instead of, well, crazy.

We all have expectations of how others should behave. We have all learned over time how we should look, how we should act and speak, or not, in certain public spaces. When we do present differently we can evoke equally predictable behaviors from our fellow spinning rock passengers.  Depending on the space, those reactions can range from bemused looks to open hostility. In my case I created this non-threatening story of an introverted mind grappling with a piece of important literature, a Woody-Allen caricature, that allows me to safely go back to my own book and read it like my mother taught me; in my head.  

But, primed I suppose by what I’ve been watching and listening, I begin to want mimic the professor, to hear out loud the words I’m reading ... but leery of escalating this affair into some type of coffee shop read off that ends with tomorrow’s headlines screaming “Professor Blasts Perspicuous Blogger”, I compromise and in lieu simply move my lips to the cadence of the little voice in my head.  

So here we are the professor reading out loud and me moving my lips. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a woman looking up from her newspaper, her slightly furrowed brow signalling her silent judgement, and then ever so slightly shaking her head she returns to her paper, leaving the two crazies to their strange little worlds.