The Old Man and the Coffee Shop (as opposed to the sea)

I spend a lot of time at the Barnes and Noble Coffee Shop on the first floor of my building at school. For all intensive purposes, the cafe is a Starbucks. The Barnes and Noble has two entrances. One entrance consists of two revolving doors and leads you into the book store. The other entrance is a conventional door that leads you directly into the cafe. When you enter the cafe, there is a large row of about 8 tables along the windows on the right. On the left side is a partition separating the book store from the cafe. This partition has what is basically a bar with stools. There are two rows of tables between the windows and the partition. The actual coffee counter is opposite the entrance. The cafe seating area is kind of narrow and the tables are close together. This makes people watching and the occasional eavesdropping optimal. Unfortunately, the eavesdropping generally (drops?) on a conversation involving some abstract legal doctrine or some stupid story about how someone got too drunk at some bar you've never heard of. In addition to the bar, the partition has two tables against it. Almost every single morning or afternoon or at some point over the course of the day, I see the same old man sitting at one of these two tables. He's always drinking a small coffee drink. He always has a small stack of high minded magazines on the table. These magazines include but are not limited to The Economist, New Yorker, Harpers, and a number of others whose titles are not familiar to me.
The man is generally wearing a large coat. He has shaggy gray hair and facial hair that makes him look unkempt, but not in the cool way. We go to school in an area of town that has a significant amount of homeless people around during the day. Not because the area is all that bad, but because there are a ton of business people-business people have money, business people don't like change weighting down their pockets, and business people tend to give this change away. At first I thought this man was homeless. I no longer think this. This sounds cruel, but he doesn't smell like a homeless person. The employees don't look at him with disgust and disdain the way they do most homeless people that wander into their beloved bookstore. He's always drinking Starbucks coffee which is not affordable for the homeless. A second look at his clothes warranted the same conclusion. His jacket, his pants, his shirt and shoes all screamed "old man," not so much "homeless!" I add the exclamation point because the clothes are screaming. Additionally, old homeless men tend to dress even more irrationally than young homeless men. His dress did not fall into this category. Finally, his stack of magazines is never excessive. Usually two or three, the amount a sane person with a home may select from a magazine shelf. They are always similarly themed as opposed to a collection such consisting of Home and Gardens, Scientific America, Field and Stream, FHM, Smithsonian, and Runners Digest (for the athletic, stay at home scientist hunter historian dad homeless person). The coherency of the collection makes me believe that this old man is perfectly sane.
A second thought I had was that maybe this man was a crazy old professor that no longer works and he just likes to hang around the academic world. Maybe he figures he can come and read the economist and some other magazines and maybe he feels like he's back where he belongs, doing something that he loves. Maybe he has some notion that his work is research, or maybe he just likes to keep himself informed. This too though, I now feel is inaccurate. The past couple of times I've seen him he's had the magazines in his hands. He's been holding them up to his face, but he hasn't been reading them. His eyes have been darting around the room. Looking at no one and nothing in particular, just observing. Not really in a creepy way, just a curious way. Nevertheless, the man is smart enough to know that if you want to look smart, these are the magazines you pull from the shelves.
I wonder though, who is this man? He's somewhere between a homeless person and a crazy old academic. I think he might just be a lonely old man, but I could be wrong. He could be some sort of weird sexual predator. He could be a former lawyer that's fallen on hard times. He could just be a guy that worked in a factory his whole life, doesn't have any family and is bored. The one thing that is certain is that the man is bored.
Today I walked through the cafe a total of four times. I probably spent around 2 hours total sitting, studying, feeding the addiction. I never saw the old man. I can't remember the last time I didn't seem him at least once over the course of the day. It would be a lie to say that I missed him. It would be insincere and it would be disingenuous. The man has not done anything for me. I don't feel all that sentimental towards him, it's really just a curiousity. Anyone, in the same position as me, that said they "missed him" would be lying. That being said, I did wonder if something happened to him. Then I thought, God I hope something happened to him. Nothing bad, obviously. Just SOMETHING. I hope his grandkids came to see him. I hope he went and visited his wife in the nursing home. I hope he went to the park. I hope he had some crazy taxi driver take him to the wrong Starbucks. I hope he had errands to run. I hope he saw a commercial for Hawaii, said "fuck it, i'm not gonna be nickel and dimed to death by Starbucks anymore, I'm going to Hawaii!," and packed a bag and left forever. That's the saddest part about being old-nothing ever happens anymore. One more thing I'm afraid of: being 75 years old and sitting in a Starbucks fake reading the Economist. I hope something good happened to him, something fun. But really, just something.
Lyric:
"There's a man holding a megaphone, must've been the voice of God."
Bright Eyes