The Pleasure of People-Watching

Before cellphones were fun, when the idea that anything may distract you from New York’s never-ending street theater was unimaginable, I would watch the world happen around me.

I often have to be reminded that there’s so much beyond the screen and all the other physical and psychological confines of my life.

Sometimes I’ll stretch out the outside time and go down to Washington Square Park. The fountain is on again now that it’s hot, and the only way to really see what’s going on around it is through sunglasses, or squinting hard beneath a brimmed hat.

Light bounces off the water from each of the spouts, spraying in all different directions. The water pressure is highest in the center, with the four biggest jets shooting up at least 10 feet.

I always feel like I’m intruding by people-watching. As if I’m breaking the rules. That in some way we’re supposed to be minding our business, and that it is somehow disingenuous to observe with the intention of just observing. As if observation is unnecessary or unbecoming if done without consent. As if it’s impolite to see others, or see yourself seeing others. As if we shouldn’t look behind the curtain.

What a relief it is to look up at the sun in the wide open sky of the park and feel the sun beating down with that intensity and heat that causes goose bumps and a shiver.

Then to notice the waves of people coming and going, rush hours and empty 11 a.m. trains, the cold smell of the air-conditioning on any of the orange-seated ones, and the initial discomfort of the temperature shock.

That gust of air always reminds me of my first summer working in the city, every day on the A train until it met the F. Those little bits of sense memory jolt us back and keep us going, carrying a mixed fragrance with notes of all the people and places that ever made a dent blended together and compressed into one bottle, a spritz that we wear unknowingly and notice only when we catch a whiff in the wild.

But then Manhattan’s specific summer musk cleanses the palate, and the day proceeds as usual, part garbage, part refreshment, and I get back on the subway. I used to memorize the numbers of the train cars, always ending up in 5252 with the orange seats, as if it was somehow special to situate myself in that exact plastic curve where I listened to that one Refused album over and over.

Looking out the window of an aboveground train, the rumble of the tracks jolting and bumping and crashing the side of your forehead into the window, the way eyes try to keep up with a moving landscape. Finding a fixed point, and sliding along with it, horizontally, before restarting and finding another object, like a resetting typewriter shoved back and forth, each line falling in the same vertical place on the page, revisiting the same page but falling further down, building one whichever line has come before. It’s only when one I lose track of where I was looking that I notice anything has ever changed.