A familiar stranger

[pegkerr]

As I've mentioned before, I usually walk across the Stone Arch Bridge everyday for exercise, sometimes several times. The bridge was crowded in the summer when the weather was nice, but now that the weather has turned colder, only the die-hards like me venture forth to admire the view across the river.

I generally go at the same time every day after eating my lunch. Most days, I pass a man crossing the bridge from the other direction. I would guess he is in his late fifties or early sixties. Every day, he carries a tote bag with the initial "M" stitched on it. He is rather portly, and he walks at a middling speed in a rather pigeon-toed manner. He wears a blue parka and black gloves and hat, and he has wire-rimmed oval glasses. His hair, originally a reddish-blond, I think, is now mostly gray; he has a mustache and short beard. I wonder where he goes every day; does he wonder about me?

Tell me about someone you see every day whom you don't know. Where do you see him or her--at the bus stop? The corner store? The coffee shop? What is the same about the person every day, and what is different? What have you gleaned about this person from observation?

Comments

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

The company here is very insular, so while I know editorial people in the college division, and even a handful in our marketing group, we share the floor with a couple of other divisions--I don't even know what the groups are. So there are frequently people wandering through who I don't know. The most memorable of them is a guy who I have seen regularly for the past two years or so--he's older than me, probably late 30s to early 40s, well dressed, Indian or Pakistani by ancestry, but I think born/raised in the US because he doesn't seem to have an accent, though I barely talk to him more than a sentence here or there. But I see him probably 2-5 times a week on average, usually in the halls or at the elevator, and he always smiles and says hi to me, and it's kinda nice.

(There's also a couple of really good looknig guys that I see fairly regularly, but I've never been able to figure out if they even work for our company or if they're just on the floor to use the cafeteria. Plus, that's just shallowness talking there.)