The Pho Show

It’s funny how the disruption of your typical routine makes you miss things you never even considered before. There were the obvious things to grieve: birthday parties, vacations, family dinners, movie nights. Then there were the things you didn’t realize you’d miss: office meetings with colleagues, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an elevator, petting a stranger’s dog in the park. For me, it’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve really thought about how much I miss one thing in particular – eating in public. This small but ever-present joy combines all the things I love most: eating, gawking at strangers, and making up stories about them. It’s dinner and a show. I miss hearing about the mundanity of life through another person’s eyes, and this innocuous eavesdropping fueled my love for storytelling.

During the pandemic, the big connections disappeared quickly. The small connections faded, quietly sliding into the background, and we all wondered why we felt so alone. Like many of the cheap and naughty thrills of life, casual eavesdropping is another activity now mostly relegated to life before the pandemic, and something I really miss. We’re no longer living in a world conducive to listening to conversations not meant for you, whether it’s work gossip you hear from the stall in the office restroom, friends chatting when you’ve left a room at a party, or strangers sitting across from you in a restaurant. Eavesdropping is so fun precisely because it is so wrong. It’s a complete break of the social contract, a listening-in that doesn’t ask for permission. It’s a very Proustian form of voyeurism, which in the current decade extends not only to whispered chats but to text conversations you can tilt your head at just the right angle to see.

Eavesdropping has the potential to be rude but also this potential of an unexpected connection. To quote Judith Butler, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other.” Eavesdropping in a way is a weird, and at times, an unseemly form of kinship. It can bring us together, whether we listen in and walk away knowing someone else a little bit more or we get caught and are forced to answer for ourselves. That’s what is exciting about it. On a more generous level, there’s also the possibility that eavesdropping is a special form of caring for one another in a world that feels so isolating. The act of eavesdropping may imply a sincere interest in the life of someone else, wanting to know how their sadness or anger will be resolved or what happened to make them so excited or happy. Maybe some people listen with the secret knowledge that they can step in if needed. I personally find the most rewarding eavesdropping to be when I do make myself known.

Picking sentences out of the air is a primal thing. We have regions in the brain, mechanisms that are designed to draw inferences from partial information that we see and hear. We are pretty good natural sleuths. Currently, we’re all a little starved for connection, even if it’s not direct so conversations, we can suddenly be shocked back to life by a million questions: Is this a breakup? Is it an affair? Is this the first time they’re seeing each other in quarantine? Why the heck is she crying?

Talking is grand, but listening is better. When we’re talking about listening to strangers’ conversations … well that is downright delightful. I love seizing an opportunity to pay attention to what’s going on around me. I listen, and learn, rather than shutting out the world — an act that could benefit us all. I listened to people on walks or sitting on benches as they discussed their marriages, their divorces, their bosses. I shared smiles with people who were like me — overhearing pieces of a stranger’s life finding something we could relate to, sharing a moment of recognition.

Eavesdropping is about connecting the dots. Catching snippets of a conversation or one side of an argument and letting your mind wander to fill in the gaps. Hearing names and places and dates you have no context for and allowing these fleeting details to weave themselves together in your brain. It’s about listening in on an experience something you’ve never lived through. It’s like watching a movie where every third line is cut, where entire scenes are missing. But it’s there, it’s alive, and you watch. These half-scenes and unfinished scripts are gone, for now, and I miss them. I miss the small pleasures of glancing through the windows into other people’s lives.

The dots will come back, though. We will talk in public again; we will complain loudly about salesclerks, call our parents from the sidewalk, run with friends in the park, and cry in restaurants. And I, for one, can’t wait to listen in.