Civic strangers may converse once familiarity legitimates the approach

Evidence

In the following rather sad story, a young man waited three months for the appropriate moment to approach a young woman: … I had been working in Chicago for three months and during all that time it had been my practice to stop at the same coffee shop near my office each morning for about a half hour before going to work. On the very last day of my job, I was in the coffee shop as usual and was preparing to leave when a young man approached me. I had noticed him before but we had never spoken. He said that he had seen me every morning for the past three months and had not wanted to approach me earlier but felt that it was alright to do so now. He said he would very much like to get to know me and perhaps to go out on a date. He introduced himself and I replied by giving him my name in return. I told him that it was very nice of him to have approached me but that this was the very last day I would be on the job; that, in fact, I would be leaving Chicago tomorrow. The interesting part of all this is that I felt it was quite proper for him to have talked to me in this way, and had I been remaining in Chicago, I might even have agreed to go out with him. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: The three months of passive, unacknowledged observation before a single greeting mirrors the civil inattention Cole portrays as isolating the observer — familiarity accrues silently, then legitimizes approach at the very moment it can no longer be reciprocated. — connects to: Unpolitical sociability supplies the familiarity that later enables civic engagement. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 126; Public talk itself, not just outcome interest, creates selves and communities. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 163
• BMF: The young man’s repeated silent watching across three months, waiting for the right moment that arrives only when the woman is about to disappear — echoes the waiting observer in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the narrator who accumulates observation until a single conversation, and also the lingering watcher motif in Home Boy.