There’s a great little bakery-sandwich shop I often go to, where on any given day, I order one of several favorite items and, then, when the weather is accommodating, sit outside and start turning the pages of the book I’m reading.

But sometimes the surrounding conversations of those nearby is more interesting or, perhaps, just a tad more intrusive than the dialogue of the characters I’ve been following. Or maybe, and there’s probably more truth to this than I would like to admit, I’m just plain nosy.

At a far table a woman was telling a man and woman whom I took to be her parents about a trip to France with her husband or boyfriend. Kind of hard to tell for sure. I quickly lost interest. She ended every statement with, “okay,” and interspersed every third word with “like.” For my listening pleasure, that was like, not okay, and I quickly tuned out.

Then two women, each with a slight variation on an egg, bacon and croissant combo (boy, wish I had ordered that!) sat down and one of the two, with a slight English accent, started describing what sounded like a group bus trip across the States. She said Yosemite was really neat – lots of mountains and waterfalls – but that there were too many homeless people near the hostel where she stayed in San Francisco. The next time, she told her friend, "I’m staying at Fisherman’s Wharf"!

Next, a threesome came along. I think husband and wife and woman friend, but kind of hard to tell. The man said not a word. Anyway, this conversation involved a trip to Israel. “It was beautiful,” one of the women said, “and I felt very safe. But the religious sites were so commercialized. Even Russia sponsors one of the sites.” I don’t know a lot about Israel, and I am going to have to look into that.

All this had taken place in little more than 30 minutes. I had just started reading Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and probably read no more than five or six pages during that time. But while Paul was chugging along through Erie and Cleveland and Chicago during the blizzard of ’78 en route to his Latin American destination, I was sipping wine at a little bistro on Boulevard St-Germain, gazing at Yosemite’s Half Dome, and kneeling before The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Israel.

Well, almost.