Eavesdropping: This Side of Paradise

I was standing in line waiting to board my plane as a conversation behind me encroached upon my ears. A guy initiated a conversation with a girl. He was newly employed as a pharmaceutical salesman who came to Jersey for training. He'd studied business and finance—typical of a guy of his appearance and manner of speaking I contemptibly thought—at a university in Ohio, a "party school," he noted. He also said that he was a big drinker. She's in graduate school at NYU studying Occupational Therapy. She lives in East Village and was visiting a friend in Nashville. She was from Arizona and has never been to Nashville, to where I was going home. After the two exchanged their information on disease and medicine, the conversation made its way to alcoholism. According to a particular scale, four drinks a day make an alcoholic. The guy replied, proudly, that he was an alcoholic by those standards.

He said something about a piece of her clothing or accessory, and her reply was "you're observant." To which he replied, "Well, I'm a salesman." He told her he was a big drinker, and then after asking her what her book was in her hand (This Side of Paradise), he said "I'm not a reader." So I suppose he'll only know pharmaceutical sales, never himself.

I stopped listening to them after they finally learned each other's names. They were no longer no one and everyone I wanted them to be. They now had an identity, had become people with more complexities and layers that might very well discard my judgments and render my assumptions less credible or even invalid about them both. We separated as we boarded the plane, and I ended up next to two Nashville residents, a man a woman. The man dominated the conversation the whole flight, but I heard only muffled speech under the hum of the jet engines outside my window.

So I turned on my overhead light, adjusted it towards my lap, and reflected on what NY had said as I had scrambled across its streets the past week. I heard the wind playing the skyscrapers, the ghettos, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It played an album through the boroughs, through all the people and their homes. The tracks were diverse and eclectic.