Don't you love taking a morning walk pushing your precious wee child in the stroller, only to come upon a standoff with three cops surrounding two angry-looking young guys? Angry-looking young guys who are speaking angrily to the cops as they start moving away from them, towards me. Do I have some kind of sixth sense for putting my child in the midst of potential gunfire? Or is it just my overactive imagination?
*************
A woman's sudden serrated voice chops my typical walking downtown reverie. I start. Are you sleeping?!? she nearly yells into a cell phone. Well, go back to sleep! I'll call back later.
She is walking fast and gets too far ahead of me for to hear any more, but I see the phone still up to her ear for quite a distance, so I'm guessing the person on the other end is still not sleeping.
*******
At the wee downtown supermarket a little girl laughs at the roasting chickens circling on their spits. Froggie bum bums! Hahahahahha...
Those are chickens her mom says. The girl looks more closely at gently rotating creatures in the oven, incredulous. Chickens?
*************
Outside again, on the edge of my consciousness I see somebody gesturing out of a car and someone walking towards me gesturing back to the person in the car. Just as I realize the person coming towards me is flipping off the driver in a good-natured way, I realize it is someone I know. The young plumber. He twinkles at me, "Hey!" I make nice back and keep walking and he keeps up the interchange with the driver, a friend I guess.
I feel a bit of a thrill, pleased that he has seen me in my hoodie and Vans, with my transition lenses darkened to cool shades, walking downtown, instead of rushing home from my middle-aged job with my ugly ID badge (which he inspected when he first came). I feel more comfortable passing him on the street than I do flirting while he plumbs the depths and contents of my hundred-year-old pipes, commenting on the amount of rice he discovered. "You guys really like rice, eh?" I said yes, thinking he must have noticed a bunch of burlap bags hanging around but no. Our pipes were full of rice apparently.
Hello 2024
10 months ago
9 comments:
A walk can be an adventure, huh?
"my transitions lens darkened to cool shades"
Oh my. Hard to know how to follow that up.
Thanks for taking me along on your walk!
i would love to go on just that walk (except for the cop confrontation bit), particularly the part where one is buoyed by a random encounter with an attractive other while actually feeling attractive and cool oneself.
alas, it is piss-pouring rain and O is in the middle of a nap strike screaming fit. so i think i will just read your post again and pretend it's me.
I love love love snippets like this. When I used to take the train to work, I'd always try to remind myself to take along a notebook to write down things I saw and heard. Of course, in the morning rush, I always forgot. But these fragments are so interesting...
I love this. And I love it when you get seen by someone when you feel good about yourself, as it so often happens when you (I) don't.
I'm wondering exactly what happened when the plumber 'twinkled' at you, and if it was anything like what crazymumma's personal trainer does?
what a gift hearing is, isn't it?
and yes, i agree w/ Mad..that phrase was killer.
I loved this! As an aside, I've always wanted transitions lenses...it's so uncool when I swap my glasses for my prescription sunglasses, sometimes in mid-walk. Ugh.
Post a Comment