1/31/07

Déjà vu, times two


Tri-O's Oddities, observations, and opinions
By Herb Kandel

Some see the world in a crystal ball, others in tea leaves or tarot cards. I recently felt immersed in a similar situation but mine happened over a plastic encased menu. The realization that I was part of the scenario came to me slowly as I observed and later became aware of what was taking place in my immediate surroundings. It happened last week as I sat alone in a restaurant , a notch above the fast food variety, having lunch after concluding some personal business in Pensacola. My seat faced the entrance where incoming diners waited to be seated, to the right was the cash register where exiting customers paid their dining bill. From this vantage point comings and goings became a passing parade.
The entire scene was evolving into something familiar but I could not put my finger on it at the time. Let me tell you what was happening within this limited sphere of my booth and you'll better understand this seeming déjà vu.
Waiting for the hostess to seat them was a young couple with an infant, the sleeping child was Oriental, not so the assumed parents. Behind them were three teen-age girls giggling over something. Making their way haltingly to the register was an elderly man and woman, both pushed walkers in front of them and each was accompanied by a caregiver whom I later saw assist them into a car. There at table to my left were grandparents discussing, in elevated voices of the hard of hearing, what to give their grandchild for her birthday as they sipped their milkshakes. A very obviously pregnant woman was trying to get the attention of a server, she wanted additional pickles for her sandwich. Waiting in the register line were three men in hard hats each a different ethnicity. The servers were mostly college students who zipped between tables with the energy that is only in my memory. The couple with the infant was shown to a table that a young man and woman just vacated, these two were holding hands and smiling at each other as they lined up behind the hard hats.
The whole scene to me became a microcosm of Life itself. Here was the whole gamut, the entire cycle surrounding me, with the exception of it’s conception and demise.
Where had I experienced this feeling before? The file cabinet of memory slowly opened to reveal two instances where the person becomes the spectator, removed from the actual events but absorbing the ambiance.
One was in the work of Christopher Isherwood who wrote “The Berlin Stories” which was made into a play in 1951 and a film in 1955 called “I Am A Camera” and later into the 1972 musical “Cabaret”. In it Isherwood says, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” He gave us a snapshot of a time and place. Although his ‘camera’ focused on Berlin in the early 1930’s the sight from my viewfinder, by comparison, was indeed more prosaic because of setting and circumstance.
The second reminder was from a 1948 movie adapted from a Pulitzer prize play by William Saroyan, “The Time of Your Life”. In it the main character (played by James Cagney) sits in a dilapidated bar and observes the colorful patrons in their eccentricities. Cagney was not only was a observer but also a participant in the happenings which changed the course of the characters lives, whereas mine was strictly a benign awareness of the proximate life stages.
There was a keen sense of discovery and awe as a witness to the sequence of human transience, here, alone. “The world may be your oyster” to paraphrase the old idiom but my revelation came while waiting for a cheeseburger, fries, and hold the onion.
END