I have a story to tell you. I promise it’s all true. This is one of those rare moments in my life when I wish I was on a reality TV show. It would have been awesome to have captured all this for future viewing.
This past Thursday I was sitting in the on-campus Starbucks with my friend and former roommate Aaron. Aaron and I get coffee together bright and early every Thursday morning. Well, I should say that I get coffee and Aaron gets water, even when I offer to pay for him. I know, I don’t get it either. When we meet we always accomplish two goals. First we read our Bibles, do a little journaling and talk about what we got out of the Scripture we read. After that we wax philosophical about the minutia of our lives. I look forward to these three hours as much as any throughout the entire week.
But this week something very special happened. Special doesn’t do the situation justice. Let me set the scene. We’re sitting at a small table in the corner situated right next to a window. It’s probably around 8:30 AM at this point, already two hours into our time together. I’m sipping on the cold remnants of my venti soy white chocolate mocha trying to remember the name of an actor. As I do this I look outside and see that directly on the other side of the glass a girl is propping her bike up against our window and leaving it there to get some coffee. She leaves it there without locking it to anything.
Yes, an event like this is all it takes to get me talking about a deeper point of human existence. I turn to Aaron and comment that it was awfully trusting of her to leave her bike there without any lock and, presumably, without anyone watching it. The idea of someone “watching your stuff” is something my cousin blogged about a little more than a year ago. She’s a psych major and took a pretty analytical view of the phenomenon. I don’t think I ever told her but I really enjoyed the post and have stolen her thoughts for use in more than a few conversations since.
Right on cue, I get to telling Aaron about this whole stuff-watching phenomenon. So there we are, trading our ideas about how one would choose a designated stuff-watcher in a situation where you have multiple candidates, when who should walk over to our table but the owner of the bike that set the whole conversation in motion. She stops at our table, looks at us and asks, “Would you guys mind watching my bike?”
The feeling I had at that moment was of intense embarrassment. I assumed she must have overheard our conversation, somehow connected the dots and realized we were talking about her. I thought she was making fun of us. The embarrassment was paralyzing; I couldn’t even bring myself to make eye contact with her. I just laughed quietly and uncomfortably, hoping Aaron would answer her question. Thankfully he volunteered our services and she walked away to get in line. When she turned I looked at Aaron, shaking my head with a nervous smile on my face.
But then it occurred to me that there was just no way she could have figured out that we were talking about her. By the time she would have been in earshot we were listing off the qualities that make a person a reasonable choice for designated stuff-watcher. There would have been no context for her to put the pieces together. I believe my new suspicions were adequately confirmed moments later when, coffee in hand, the young woman smiled a most sincere smile at me and mouthed “thank you” from the other side of the window. She hadn’t heard us; she was simply asking the two people with the best view of her bike if they’d be willing to keep an eye on it.
Do you see what this means? It means that Aaron and I were talking about a hypothetical point and, almost on-demand, experienced that thought in the real world. Furthermore, we experienced the thought through the individual who initially spurred on the hypothetical point. It’s like something out of a TV show, where action, thought and conversation are woven in such a way to produce the highest possible level of entertainment and experience. Someone watching our morning coffee would have gotten a real kick out of that scene.
Here’s a little aftermath for you. As I was telling this story later that evening to my friend Amanda after Nav Night had ended we had two people come up to us asking if we would be willing to watch their things for a few minutes. I felt like I’d fallen into the twilight zone. I felt so weird about the whole thing that I purposely typed this post at home rather than in a public place with wi-fi to prevent the possibility of someone asking me to watch their things while writing about this experience. Had that happened I’m pretty sure my head would have exploded.
Maybe I’m just crazy and this kind of thing happens all the time. You would tell me if that were the case, right?
