Farewell to the Fountain

My office has been move to the second floor, where my window mirror and fountain view have been replaced with a lovely view of the Wasatch Mountains. But before I moved, the fountain decided to host a final, bravura performance.

I was in the midst of a discussion with a co-worker when she looked over my shoulder out the window and asked, “What is going on?” There was some sort of commotion on the street involving police sirens, like an orchestral overture had started to signal the raising of the curtains. As if on queue, a longer haired man with a backpack came sprinting from stage right, tossed his backpack from his should, and leapt several feet into the air and came down on his side into the fountain. There was an audible clunk as he hit bottom followed by a rattling shockwave on the window. There was a long pause. His backpack lay on the ground against the fountain directly in front of my window.

“Is he hurt? Or is he stoned?” I asked. My co-worker shrugged.

We stood on our tip-toes and craned our necks to try to see down into the fountain. I could barely see the man’s upper torso as he glided about the fountain on his back, occasionally spewing water from his mouth as if it were a blow hole.

“Stoned,” we both intoned in unison.

Before we could puzzle out the plot further, we heard the wail of a motorcycle cop headed toward the fountain.  The swimmer heard it too and immediately siddled up against the edge of the fountain wall. It was like a toddler was playing hide and seek. Perhaps if he had closed his eyes, it would have been more effective. In short order, he was out of the fountain, on his stomach in handcuffs.

By this time, several other co-workers had joined the premium seating along my window. The motorcycle cop was followed by the police cruiser, and then an ambulance. We speculated whether it was the swan dive into the fountain or the drugs in his system that prompted the ambulance and agreed it was likely the former.

In the end, another long-haired man in cuffs sat in the background on a grassy mound watching his presumed accomplice surrounded by a chorus line of cops and paramedics. The drama continued to unfold for the next few hours.  I had the opportunity to re-count the plot points from the first act for many late comers for much of the morning.

The fountain really out did itself for this farewell production. I almost didn’t want to move.

Almost.

The Fountain & the Plaza

When you have a first floor window on the world, you see things that you never expected to see. I’m not talking about dead pigeons, elderly people breaking their hips, creative nose-picking and the waddle-walk of the morbidly obese. No. Those are the expected things. People do strange things when they think no one is watching. And they do these things in front of my office window or around the fountain across the plaza (about 20 yards from my window).

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that my window has been mistaken for a public mirror. I’ve raised my eyebrows as people seemingly stared right at me while combing their hair, putting on lipstick, and doing other activities of varying hygienic value. The best/worst example of a window-mistaken-for-mirror incident: the lady who, upon seeing her reflection in the office window, decided that some part of her upper torso needed adjusting. My co-worker reported that it left my boss speechless for two-minutes (a new record) and caused him to turn several shades of red.

But the highlights this summer have all been about the fountain. It started when I looked out my window to see two bizarrely dressed people, a man and a woman, standing on the edge of the fountain in odd poses. Then I noticed the photographer. The two were clearly doing a fashion shoot, because no one on this side of the Atlantic tries so hard to look that indifferent while wearing clothes like that.

A few days later the “fashion fountain” became the washing machine. One of homeless regulars furtively glanced around the plaza before dropping his entire backpack into the fountain, swishing it back and forth and taking it for a few laps. I wasn’t sure that I had just seen what I thought I had just seen until later on in the day when the groundskeeper pulled out a pool cleaning pole and retrieved a few items that had fallen out of the backpack. (I don’t know what the groundskeeper did with them, but I almost want to believe he kept them; I spent the first six to nine months on the job thinking that the groundskeeper was one of the “regulars.”)



But the incident that took the cake happened a few days ago. I got a call from the second floor asking me to check out the people outside my window. I was stunned to see a frumpy, egg-shaped couple, mid-sixty-ish, in bathing suits, “swimming” in the fountain. After rubbing my eyes a few times, I remembered that my cell phone has a camera, but by then, the couple had exited the pool and were slowly walking across the plaza, hand in hand, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

Though perhaps I should be less harsh in my judgments; a co-worker sent me this picture while I was out of the office with the caption of “former Bank employee.” At least he still has a mirror and a washing machine.