A Study in Strangers

 It has been both a long week and a short week, if that is possible.

The week started on Sunday with Ashley calling to say her car suddenly stopped working. More on that in a different post.

Speaking of suddenly stopping to work ... thunderstorms are threatening to take away our power. The internet keeps coming and going.

Now it is Friday. Don and Ashley are both behind the scenes at shows -- Ashley at Bucks County Playhouse with Alien8, Don at Somerset Valley Players with Guys and Dolls. Me, on my own. On Tuesday I thought I would be home alone since we were down a car, but it was repaired yesterday (several days earlier than expected). I decided to spend this sticky night in Princeton.

While waiting in line for ice cream from the bent spoon, I overheard a couple of 20-somethings chatting. The woman was animated talking about a number of different topics with an excitement I have missed in my own conversations. The man, a friend, had a lilting Island accent I later learned was from Trinidad. By the time I reached the top of the line and could see the flavors, nothing caught my interest, so I left them to figure out what they wanted.

She told me about her Communist brother and ultra conservative father living together in Maryland and how the rest of the family falls in-between the two extremes making Thanksgiving something to avoid. Yet, she doesn't mind still being on their cell phone plan -- something I am learning is a new rite of adulthood.  

I thought that was the end of that. I left the line and walked around Princeton landing at Hinds Plaza next to the library. Tonight was one of their Dancing Under the Stars evenings. They have someone playing music (DJ would be too strong a term). According to the announcement in Town Topics, they have dance instructors teaching classic dance steps. From my bench outside the square I did not notice them. 

I saw people of a variety of ages dancing. Mothers younger than me dancing with their pre-teen children. Couples in their 20s and 30s dancing with each other. A table of older people caught my interest because they brought a table cloth and a picnic basket, which I presume held their dinner or at least a charcuterie board with cheese, crackers, and grapes. The couple, at least a decade or two older than us, was trying to save all four seats by switching to across from each other to next to each other as members of their party rejoined them. There was a man about their age elegantly dancing with a woman his age dressed in a coral sweater shell and pristine white linen trousers, but she didn't join the table. Then a younger woman (as in younger than me) with wild curly brown hair sat with them to swap out her shoes. I wonder if she was their daughter.

A family of five dressed as if they just left Lahaire's, or another upscale Princeton restaurant paused as they walked by the dancers. The mom, a woman in her upper 50s wearing a blue summery dress with white sandals seemed to want to stop and dance. The husband, dressed in an upscale Hawaiian shirt and trousers seemed to want to humor his wife, but not enough to get out and dance. Their children were all too old to be with their parents on a Friday night in the summer. In my imagination, they are gathered to celebrate mom's birthday -- they want to indulge her, but they don't want to be seen in public doing so.

This brings me back to the man and woman from the ice cream parlor. As I was leaving the dancers I saw them again. This time they were eating their remains of their ice cream. He had chocolate hazelnut (the flavor he was thrilled they had because it is his favorite, and they don't have it very often). She had her favorite, coconut, and a random flavor because you have to have two flavors (the bent spoon started offering only one size with the pandemic and they haven't returned to other options). For someone so brilliant in other ways, it never dawned on her that both scoops could be the same flavor. She said next time she'll just get two scoops of the coconut since that is her favorite.

I called her smart. She is post-doc student at Princeton. She cannot get over the cost of rentals in this area. She encouraged me to convert my office into an apartment and rent it to a post-doc student. She pays $1,350 a month for a tiny apartment in someone's home in my town. Just think of the revenue stream! If everyone rented their spare rooms, then the housing problem would disappear! She is going to write an op-ed about it. 

Miss Maryland has that kind of passion and excitement. She is new vegan (which sounded experimental the way she described it). A contradiction in terms.

As I mull over my future, I'm studying strangers and trying to make up stories about them. Keep reading for more. All based on real people, people who will likely never read this, nor recognize themselves in the situations.