Passing Strangers

Three nights ago, I'm walking with a student back to the station after a lesson. We cut through a recently built stylish building--a building of window-walls, exposed escalators and transparent vertical layers where you can watch a woman look at her ass in new jeans in a beautiful mirror on the third floor while at the same time watch a couple selecting a diamond ring from a vast glass counter of dark wood on the second floor (parallel lives playing out which we passing by can watch). You know the sort of place. Anyway, the place is closed at this time of night and we're short-cutting through its central arcade. No one else it there, but at the far end another couple have just entered and are coming our way. We approach each other as strangers do, but the man stands out somehow. His silhouette is familiar. Actually, the silhouette of his hair is familiar, as though it is a helmet of hair, thick and perhaps fake but probably not fake because why would this particular "he" choose "that" fake hair should he have the need to choose fake hair. As we get closer, my eyes are locked on him, because at 40 feet off I'm pretty sure he is who I thought he might be at 60 feet. And, at 20 feet, I'm sure and trying to play it cool because I don't want to be a dick to him, even just as a passing stranger. We continue to pass each other. 10 feet off, he looks at me and an expression comes across his face like he knows me, but I assume it's because I have that same expression on my face, but x10. He's familiar to me, as fame makes a person become. I'm looking at him with the giddy feeling of recognition building inside. He almost seems to start to speak, but perhaps it's to his companion. I don't start to speak. I can't remember if I nodded a hello, a nod that two men, strangers to each other--each with a woman--might nod to the other in an empty event of architecture to indicate, "I am not here to threaten you." A gesture of urban civility, which, ironically, could possibly be viewed as a threat. I do remember he was smiling in the way that Tadao Ando smiles. The smile of an ex-boxer and builder of rugged elegance, a dreamer of delicate concrete flowers.

Yes, it was Ando Tadao and he was taller than used to imagine him.