Paying attention

Such a change from yesterday.  Yesterday, beside the Rideau Canal, young women from the University of Ottawa stretched on the greening grass, like lilies in the warm sun.  Today, when I walked down to the canal to eat my lunch beside the path, I had to zip my jacket against the damp chill.

The Ottawa Race Weekend comes up near the end of May, and people have begun to train seriously.  As I ate my sandwich and savored segments of a clementine, I watched the runners passing on the path.  We have some very serious runners in Ottawa.  And some aging runners.  I estimate the mean age somewhere in the forties, with a few men well into their sixties.  I suppose that I shouldn't judge:  me, at fifty, still pretending to bike like I'm sixteen, while ignoring the chronic twinge in my cranky right knee.

At the next bench over, a young man sat peering at a blackberry or cell phone, his thumbs dancing on the keypad.  I wondered what had brought him down to the canal.  Had he come to relax?  Or, like me, to watch the world pass by?  He didn't have a lunch, a book, a companion.  Why come to the canal, I wondered, just to spend the time peering at a tiny screen, oblivious to everything else?  After ten or fifteen minutes, he stood up, slipped the gadget into his pocket, and walked away briskly toward Laurier Street.

I see the same behaviour on City busses.  I love riding the bus.  I can think of no better place to watch people.  The young and the old, the mingling cultures.  Flirtings and snubs.  Smiles and glimpes of quiet desperation.  I've watched a businessman slip a mickey from his brief case, take a sip, and then cast me a wary glance at me as he slipped the bottle back.  I've listened to mothers and their children singing "the wheels on the bus", and watched young women lean back and snuggle into their boyfriends' shoulder.  I've ridden the neary-empty bus on dark, rainy nights and wondered at the destination of my unnamed companions.

It puzzles me, therefore, why so many people immediately isolate themselves when the sit down on the bus.  They adjust their earbuds and the volume on their iPods.  They text friends.  The drop their eyes, or turn their faces to the window, lost in million mile stares.  So sad.  Such wasted opportunities.