Just Looking

As I came out to my car today I noticed this man across the road, standing motionless, with his elbows propped on the wall, staring into a neighbor's garden with what appeared to be great concentration. Like other houses on this up-market road, theirs have electric gates, which were shut, and a generous lawn/moat. The man's immovability would have seemed sinister if we were living in a less populated area and it was nighttime. But on a sunny afternoon in a Dublin suburb, with people passing to and fro, it just seemed off-key, at odds with the flow of cars, bicycles and foot-traffic. I watched him for awhile and took a few photos, mainly because there was something intrinsically curious about that rapt pose. Nothing shifty or peeping-Tomish (the occupants were almost certainly out, no signs of life in the big windows on the far side of the lawn); the man was apparently oblivious to me and everything else. If you could have plucked him up and dropped him in another location he would have made a perfect train-spotter or twitcher, especially if you'd put a pair of binoculars in his hands. So there seemed something almost innocent about this man. But who knows? He eventually turned round, after about ten minutes, and seemed to notice me (I was in my car by this stage, about to drive off). He didn't hurry off, just stood there, his back against the wall, looking across the road, as if he'd just woken from a daydream.