Novel Experiences of the Common Kind

 Sipping my cappuccino at Bread Basket, nibbling at my cinnamon roll, engrossed in the novel I'm reading, I recognize only very gradually that there is a man standing just to my right speaking to me. His voice is background noise at first, white noise, but unravels itself at last from the rest and I look up to find a tall Australian, smiling, one tooth missing in the front of his mouth.

"Oh, hi," I exclaim apologetically, wondering at the same time whether I know this man. 

"Long time since I seen anyone doing that," he says, nodding toward the book in my lap. 

"Reading?" 

"Yeah. Usually staring at an iPhone, you know? Scrolling. Good to see a man with an actual book. 

Hmm. Well, good to be a man with an actual book, I'm thinking.

"I brought along a couple myself. Working my way through. Staying away from the clicks and scrolls and bells and whistles."

We smile at one another. 

"Ok, mate, I'll let you get back to it." 

Instead of 'getting back to it', I look around to see what I've been missing. The story outside the book which has been happening at the same time as the story inside the book. A very tall woman, no doubt Dutch, because the Dutch are on average the tallest people in the world, is whirling in circles while holding her baby. The baby, blue-eyed and not at all tall, is wearing a pink knit cap, smiling up at her mother and wearing on her unusually white face a mixture of glee, surprise and just a hint of fear. The mother is laughing, wide-eyed, blond hair billowing behind her in the whirl. Across the narrow street an Indonesian man trudges along carrying one thousand brooms over his right shoulder and one thousand feather dusters in his left hand. He is a giant in his own way, though not in the same manner as the Dutch woman. "Sapu, sapu," the man calls out as he moves along the street just outside the curbing. But nobody seems to be sweeping today. Behind me a table full of Germans debate something with growing excitement, sounding a bit like a Nuremberg rally, but that is the fault of the language, not the people. Now a waitress is at my left shoulder. Little by little she is there, saying something. "Maaf," I say. I'm sorry. What? She is asking whether I would like another coffee. And here I am in two worlds at once, two stories occurring at the same time, page by page, minute by minute, the one experienced in submersion, the other in surfacing. The mind breathes in, the mind breathes out. And stories live between each breath.