Weird Presence

Working in the same office as my father (when he's in town) has created an unexpected new situation: we can run into each other in the men's room without knowing the other person was in there. At a movie theater or a restaurant or anywhere else where we happen to be in the same place, we're in that place as part of a group (often a group of two), and so we typically say things like "I need to use the men's room before we leave," or "Excuse me," and getting up from the table to walk in the relevant direction. The situation of walking into the men's room to find my father washing his hands without knowing he'd be there is actually pretty rare in my experience.

So: what I've realized that's kind of weird is that I can walk into the men's room, note that a stall is in use, select another stall, and then realize my father is in the adjacent stall. He doesn't say anything (nor do I), there's nothing overt to signal his presence. There also aren't any sort of unpleasant or squeam-inducing indicators - I don't mean that I'm sitting there thinking "hey, those are the sounds of my father's indigestion!" It's the overall aural vibe: the sound and rhythm of his breathing, the way I can hear him shift his weight slightly, a soft cough. (When he passed in front of my stall after washing his hands I could see him in the crack of my stall door, so I received confirmation.) There wasn't a particular tell or giveaway, either. I just sat down and then instantly realized: "Hey, that's my dad."

When I was a kid I could tell, with my door closed, which of my parents was walking down the hall. This didn't have anything to do with the weight of the person, since during the era in question both my father and my mother were in the vicinity of 215 pounds; I could pick them out by the rhythm of their walk and where they placed their steps in that hallway (and later on my dad's ankles started making funny noises), but that was distinguishing between a class of two; I never would've assumed that I could identify either of their walk-sounds out of fifty possibilities (ankle-noises aside). Maybe I was wrong.

I don't think this is some special acuity I've got; I just think it's cool because I've learned a slightly weird (and for me at least weirder because it involves the bathroom) thing about us: we can hear and recognize another person's presence without them making an intentional sound.

(Completely unscientific alternate theory: familial pheremones?)