summer smiles surprised as time walks by

I like street cafés here. Leipzig has many. They let you people watch, so you see lives go by - wide, thin, tall, short, well-groomed, yawn-boring, and knock-down good-looking. How much of this is voyeuristic or simply part of learning to understand the nature of life?

Saturday evening I wanted to go to an open-air concert of the Gewandhaus Orchestra - one of the oldest ensembles in the world. Just before the concert began, it started raining, so the event was moved into the concert hall. Immediately the 2,000 people gathered began streaming to the other side of the square to be the first into the hall. We, with our wine and beer in hand, sought a street café on the side-line and just observed the chaos. Since one of the guys in our party was the public relations director for this orchestra, I had an inside angle on the whole event. Since the hall did not seat 2,000, we decided to forgo the event and sought a tapas bar instead. After the concert all the orchestra musicians came to the tapas bar also, so we still had some skewed participation in the event, and we did a lot of people watching.

I also watch the leaves - fall is starting, but summer is still here. It is sunny, highs in the upper 70s (25 C), and yet the leaves are turning. Reminds me of a German poem "Sommer lächelt, erstaunt und matt in dem sterbenden Gartentraum" (Summer smiles surprised and drooping in the dying garden dream - my own translation). This does not happen in Texas, but in Texas we do not sit in street cafés and watch the people saunter by. And in Texas the leaves fall in a day or two, instead of in a month or two.

Yet I enjoy this - it gives me the illusion of standing away from the stream observing life passing by in many others, though I actually do continue to participate in this passing.

These thoughts help me when I feel overwhelmed by the passing by of life in my own existence.