Just Sit and Watch

Lessons in observation from a not-so-stranger

I didn’t meet Anthony Bourdain once. We didn’t meet in Paris, in the Charles de Gaulle Airport. I was flying to Bordeaux and so was he.

I’ll back up.

It’s April 2016. I’ve flown overnight from Boston, Air France, arriving in Paris at 7:30 a.m. My connecting flight to Bordeaux leaves in two and a half hours. I hoist my bag from the overhead bin and pilot it down the narrow aisle. Merci, bonne journée, I call, bumping onto the jet port ramp.

I must transfer from international to local terminal via air train. I find my way to the platform as others crowd in. Some are fluent with the routine, many more bewildered. The train arrives and I roll into a car, making myself small against the railing. Just before the doors close a man ducks into a seat near me. He’s white, lanky, in late middle age, head crowned in grizzled curls. He wears jeans and a t-shirt and leather jacket. No luggage. He looks like a tall, French, Anthony Bourdain.

Or maybe it is Anthony Bourdain. Or maybe I’m tired.

The train jerks forward as I eye the familiar stranger. He rubs his face and slumps. He looks bloodshot, dissipated, like he’s just wrung himself to consciousness.

We arrive and the car empties. I quit the platform, wheel toward the gate, emerge into blistered sunlight. House sparrows flit between seats scavenging crumbs, permanent residents in a transient place. The red carpet makes the hot terminal hotter.

It’s the middle of the night within my cell walls but I must pretend it’s day. I descend to the cafés on the floor below to buy a mixte and an expresso. I order in French and am answered in pitiless English.

Back upstairs the gate is filling. The tall man is here now. He is hard to miss. He seems more awake, even tranquil, and I watch him as he idles, desultory, watching others. He sloughs his leather jacket in the heat. He is meters away and the crowd obfuscates my view, but I see his arms are inked.

I wake my phone and google “anthony bourdain tattoos.” The phone sips French telecom as I peer into the riddle of photos, breathless.

When I look up, real-life Anthony Bourdain is striding to one of the handful of empty seats. There is another right beside him. I walk over and lower myself down.

We sit in silence, as strangers do, together and not together. I am mindful of my own anonymity and feel strangely protective of his. Around us other strangers fondle phones, thumb newspapers, fold and re-fold trench coats. We observe them.

An agent starts to call rows. Bourdain rises, First Class. I watch as he disappears into the maw of the jetway.

“Don’t be afraid to just sit and watch,” he tells a travel reporter two years later, shortly before he takes his own life.

Meaning: Don’t be afraid to know something and say nothing. Don’t be afraid to know nothing and say nothing. Don’t be afraid to be, without the urgency of becoming.

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Images: Paris Charles de Gaulle Terminal F ©2025 Meg Maker