Invisible Photographer

A writer's camera
photo by LeoL30.

I’ve taken the day off because of a cold. Like the groundhog coming out of his hole, I sensed spring was here and emerged from the skyways to walk home outside. Now I have a sore throat. I’m sitting in the window at Dunn Bros Coffee, a 20oz mug of green tea warm in my hands. I brought “Tender is the Night” with me, but the book sits unread. Instead I watch in a daze out the window at the masses of people walking past, gliding by on roller blades and skateboards, or sitting at sidewalk tables. Maybe it’s the cold, but I feel this sense of peace and of seeing things differently, more precisely, less for-granted.

Several bike couriers sit around a sidewalk table, reclined low in their chairs. What a unique fashion style bike couriers have; all tall and thin, wearing baggy dirty jeans rolled up high, exposing little sticks of ankles, dark socks, and shoes with hardly a sole. Their hair is wild, swept off their foreheads, frozen in place from the wind on their bikes. Several wear those tiny bicycle caps with the visor dipped low over their eyes while riding, turned backwards and visor tipped up while they recline.

Two young women take a table just outside my window. You can always tell who are inseperable friends because they begin to look like each other. Same cute, short haircuts with little ribbons tied to locks of hair near the nape of the neck. One of them wears a charcoal gray skirt, a brown top, and these hideous orange suede boots with long pointy toes and floppy tops that gather around her ankles. Everyone stares. But she wears them proudly, a kind of fuck-you to all us clones. Her friend wears these giant bug-like sunglasses like a movie star. I wonder how big sunglasses will get before they begin to shrink again. The two women often look towards my window to inspect their own reflections.

There’s the older man with his wife, probably in his fifties; tall, in good shape. His face looks like an old baseball, his dominant feature a giant cleft chin, the crease in the middle so pronounced that it looks like butt cheeks, but it gives him a noble air.

The guy sitting next to me, tapping away on his laptop, pauses and watches me out of the corner of his eye. He notices I just stare out the window. I don’t care. I consider pointing out to him the bicycle couriers, the man with the cleft shin. They both look so regale out there, they would make excellent photographs. If I had the guts I would tell him, “I wish I could take their pictures without them knowing it, an invisible photographer, because as soon as they know their picture is being taken, they become self-conscious and the image is ruined.”

“But the camera isn’t your artitistic tool,” he would respond. “You’re a writer. You capture them with words, and in that sense, you are an invisible photographer.”

I think he’s right, but I I don’t have my journal with me. I see a Garfield pencil someone left on the counter after doing the crossword puzzle. On the back flap of “Tender is the Night”, I write:

-- Cleft Chin
-- Big Sunglasses
-- Invisible Photographer
-- Two Friends