People Watching

People Watching

The other day I saw Rodney Meadows walking along Calea Manastur. The Rodney Meadows I know would have no reason to ever walk on the sidewalks of Calea Manastur, but the fellow looked so nearly identical I nearly called aloud to him. It’s amazing how often it is that someone’s features remind me a friend from a previous life. It was even more amazing when a few days later I spied someone that looked just like his wife Jenny.

My mother was a romantic. She loved the old poem, “A House By the Side of the Road” by Sam Walter Foss. She had a notion of watching the ‘race of men go by’. One of the nicest of Nancy and my occupations is watching that portion of the race of men that occupy Transylvania, Romania walk by. And walk they do. People are always walking somewhere.

There are not many ethnic minorities visible in the faces here. Hungarians and Romanians are quite indistinguishable to me until they speak. The Gypies, or Roma to be politically correct, wear different clothes and are perhaps a shade darker in skin color, but are set apart not by their appearance so much as their way of life. Roma can be difficult to distinguish unless they are wearing their distinctive dress. There are very few non European faces in the crowd. But still, it is the race of man that we watch.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve lived so long in small towns and countryside that the population of a city fascinates us. Perhaps it’s because we feel a little apart, a little foreign, that we take so much pleasure in observing. Partly it might be that it is one of the three pillars of the Peace Corps to absorb a culture and explain it to Americans back home. Whatever the reasons, I do enjoy watching the people.

I’ve seen several that have reminded me of an old girl friend. I hadn’t ever placed Sharon Maulding as being typical of Eastern Europe, but there have been at least four different ladies that have brought her to my mind. None of them would be the same age as Sharon, and she would have no more chance of magically appearing from the fields of North Dakota to walk on the streets of Cluj as would Rodney Meadows. For a brief instant though, in my mind I see her as she was thirty years ago.

Nancy, too, finds familiar faces and body structures in the people here. She hasn’t mentioned finding an old boy friend amongst the Romanians, but maybe she just hasn’t told me.

Today, March 1st, is Martiesoara. People give one another trinkets tied with red and white ribbon. Mostly it’s a female thing, I gave two to my co workers at Bioterra, Nancy passed out hers to the ladies at her work. It is an emblem of the death of winter, sort of like our April 1st, but without the pranks.