WHOA!!! Chance male observation.

[Merteuil]

I was walking my dog yesterday afternoon. Sometimes I walk through a little alleyway beside a school. It's shady and quiet back there, and no one is ever back there. Until yesterday. I was walking, when I heard three huge sneezes erupt out of an unseen guy.

HAAAAAAAAAAA-Chh, HAAAAAAAAAA-chhhhhhh, HHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA-chhhhhhhhh!!!!

Well, I stopped in my tracks, and considered turning around to go back the way I'd come, but I couldn't

I walked up a bit more, and rounded a turn when I saw this young guy (maybe thirty at the oldest). He was tall and lean with very dark hair, fair skin, sharp features, and a narrow nose. He looked kind of like the actor Adrian Brody. As soon as I saw him, he was in the middle of a massive buildup. He saw me, and turned to face the opposite direcion. I walked forward, giving him a wide berth, and when I was about five feet from him, he let loose again with four or five sneezes. All of them were huge.

I said "Bless you." He looked up at me and said, "Thank-HACHOO-you."

I must have given him a sympathetic look, because he explained to me that he'd gone for a walk to clear his head after driving his girlfriend's three cats to their new house. He said that the cats' shedding in the car had set off his allergies, and he was just trying to get all his sneezing out before having to go home.

Well, as much as I wanted to stay, I had to walk on. I said goodbye, wished him well, and was on my way. I could hear sneezing on and off the entire time I was walking near that alleyway. Seriously, those sneezes were huge. I felt like a total nutter as I walked on, trying to strain to hear just one more before getting home.

[Sneesee]

NICE OBS! I love that he sneezed while trying to say thank you! Too awesome!!! I don't know how you managed to keep walking. I would've stopped and tried to come up with something else to say to him just to witness some more! Thank you for sharing!!!

[Chate Noire]

Oh, that's GREAT. Sneezes so loud they were audible all around the block =)

[atchoum]

What a wonderful observation. It's top hayfever time here in France and I have not seen a single allergy attack !

Very clever of you to have engaged in conversation. Usually someone sneezing paralyses all my social reflexes!

[atchoum]

The dilemma of making contact with a sneezing stranger reminds me of a couple of encounters I had long ago, but which have remained in my memory. In one, successful contact was made, the other not.

The best contact I think I ever made was in a street in Paris about ten years ago, so some of the details are a bit hazy now. I was walking to a metro station when I stopped to adjust my watch, when I saw out of the corner of my eye a man sneeze silently into his handkerchief. He was still quite a way off, and it was the characteristic lurch forward that caught my attention. I kept fiddling with my watch as he came nearer. He was dressed in a suit – businessman in his latish thirties – walking with a handkerchief in his hand, which he would bring to his nose as his shoulders would hunch and he would catch the sneeze in the still folded handkerchief, without any attempt to blow. He passed me without looking in my direction, so I decided that I would go to the metro station in his direction, and followed him first from a distance, noting how the shoulders would begin to hunch before the sneeze would overcome him. After about half a dozen sneezes like this, I plucked up courage, quickened my pace and was just walking past him when he sneezed again (still virtually silently – he must have turned off the vocal chords completely) and I said “à vos souhaits” he smiled and said thankyou so I said something like “out of season allergies ?”, and he went into a long explanation of how he would get inexplicable sneezing fits which would go on and on. I didn’t have to prompt any more. Eventually he said something like that talking to me had stopped his fit so he thanked me again and our ways parted.

The other encounter is even more ancient. I had lost a screw from my sunglasses and dropped into an opticians in the boulevard Saint-Michel. The optician was tall with very short hair, all alone in his shop – it was early on a Saturday morning, and he must have just opened. He sat me down where people try on glasses and went behind where he started working on mine, so he was just in front of me, but separated by a screen of mirrors – I could see him in other mirrors and there was a crack in the screen, so he was really very close to me, but separated. While he was working on the glasses (the whole thing wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes) he had a fit of catlike sneezes - can’t remember exactly how many, though I remember wondering how long he could go on sneezing without drawing breath. Thanks to the mirrors, I was able to look at this absolutely debilitating fir from various angles at the same time, without the optician being aware I was looking. I was dying to ask if he always sneezed like this, but as he couldn’t acknowledge that I had seen him sneeze, I couldn’t find any opening. But for years afterwards, I would look in on my way down the boulevard Saint-Germain and if I would see him, I would think to myself “I know something very intimate about you !”

[Empathic Mystery]

Merteuil,

Those sounded absolutely wonderful. It's so cool that you were able to talk to him about it for a minute or two, especially to get an explanation of why he was sneezing. That always serves to fuel my imagination. Your description of him was very sexy, too.

Atchoum,

Both of those sound lovely to witness. That guy in the station was so open about his sneezes, just freely talking about them. I wonder why some people are like that, and some people are so shy about sneezing?

~Me~

[Kitty]

like a total nutter as I walked on

would have been my throbbing response as well - LOL - I loved it! Thank you for the delicious obs!

Kitty