Paperbacks

When I was getting up to leave Vivace, I noticed a quiet table where a woman and her two kids were sitting, reading silently. The woman was flipping through a magazine, the kids – a boy and a girl – had old mass market paperbacks. I didn’t see the covers, but the books seemed to be relatively advanced for the kids; neither of them could have been older than eight. I watched for a second, expecting something to happen – one of the kids getting bored and kicking the other, or just one of them squirming in his seat. (Somebody yawn!) But they just sat there contentedly, engrossed in their books. The boy just turned a page without throwing a crayon across the room, exactly the way you or I would have. I’m not exactly sure why I thought the scene was such an anomaly.

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