People-Watching at Syosset Borders

There are all sorts of reasons for people-watching. Curiosity. Boredom. Vicarious experience. Even genuine concern for humanity. As a novelist, I combine all these with a sense of entitlement. Human behavior is, after all, my business. Nosiness is a job requirement.

So last year, when I began lugging my laptop to the cafe in the Syosset Borders to find inspiration (and free Wi-Fi!) among the stacks of bestsellers, it was a welcome bonus to discover myself surrounded by all manner of interesting people. Each, I was sure, had his or her own story, and my imagination filled in the gaps.

During my first visit, I opened my laptop to get right to work on my current novel. As I paused to sip my latte and consider what types of obstacles to happiness I could give my characters, I couldn't help notice the couple sitting in front of the window. He was a young man in hospital scrubs. She was a slender bohemian in black with dozens of bangle bracelets. I watched their body language, and surmised they were flirting. I decided they were a modern romance and had met cute at Syosset Hospital, where he was the surgeon who had operated on her boyfriend, an inconsiderate lug who happened to get sick at the very moment she decided to break up with him.

How would this end? Would she depart with the handsome doctor, or would guilt drive her back to the ailing lout? I wasn't going to leave before I saw how it played out.

Directly in front of me were four women of a certain age playing mah jongg. Mah jongg. I had heard it was making a comeback, but this foursome didn't seem to be riding the crest of a new trend. No, I liked to imagine they had kept this game going since the early '60s, when they were four young mothers. Their friendship spanned generations, and they had seen each other through every kind of joy and heartache—births, deaths, marriages, divorces, graduations, careers, fortunes made and fortunes lost.

Perhaps one had a daughter who became an important political figure while another lost a son to a drug overdose. I imagined sweeping character arcs that took them through the women's movement, the civil rights era, Reaganomics, 9/11 and Botox. Theirs was a multi-generational saga.

By the back wall, a tense man with gelled hair and an expensive Italian suit sat tapping into his laptop, stopping occasionally to check his BlackBerry. Clearly he was a salesman between calls, though I had trouble figuring out exactly what he sold. Some kind of office goods? He looked slick enough to be a stockbroker, but if that was the case he would be in the office, not out on the road.

He stole a surreptitious glance at a burly guy in the corner wearing a baseball cap. Was it my imagination, or had the stocky guy moved his magazine to tap his nose in some kind of small, secret signal? I hoped he had! It would mean he was an undercover cop, maybe even FBI, and the man in the suit was an informant. No wonder he looked edgy. I had stumbled upon a real life thriller.

With renewed energy and inspiration, I went back to working on my laptop, but not before glancing back at the couple by the window. To my surprise, the woman was now sitting all alone, engaged in a paperback. What had happened to the handsome doctor? Did he have to go back to work? Had they made arrangements to meet after work for dinner?

I didn't know if there would be a happy ending, and if would turn out to be a romance, drama, comedy or tragedy, but I did know that there were almost as many stories in the Borders Café as there were in the stacks.

Inspiration, indeed.