Two-for-One

Work has been a great place to make acquaintances, but as far as friendships go it's a bit more difficult. The problem is a lot of my co-workers are married with families and are a few years older than me. So it's not like we get together at night to play the latest video game, or go out to the bars. But like I said, it has been great for acquaintances and I do talk to several of the workers around the water cooler (yes we have the iconic water cooler which we all stand around). Yesterday, one of the workers who spends a lot of time at that cooler came by. She wanted to kill two hours and knew I could easily gab for that long. After about one hour of this another co-worker came along who wanted to speak with her. So she said I was off the hook. And I yelled at her that "I'm not just some object that can be used for awhile and then thrown out like the trash (we all know this is actually true but I like to pretend it's not)." She said, "You should be flattered that I wanted to talk with me for two hours in the first place." "Well I would be if you weren't married and moving to California on Saturday."

As all the students are moving in this week, she is moving out. That's okay though, because while I suppose I do like them hard to get, I find girls who are married and living on the other side of the country are a bit out of my reach.

Today she asked if I could take her to the airport so she could pick up a rental car because her's is being shipped out to California and she's flying there. The airport is really close so it wasn't a big deal. On the way we had to go through a residential section and I saw a couple walking three basset hounds. Oh my. She said she never saw me look so happy before. It reminded me of when I was a child in elementary school and the awards assembly we had twice a year or so to recognize scholastic achievement. For each grade a teacher or the principal would call up the students who got A's and B's and earned the merit roll, and those who got all A's and earned the honors roll. You then got to walk up, shake the principal's hand, get a piece of paper saying you made the merit or honor roll and a fancy colored pencil. Now even then I knew this was just a nice thing mostly for the parents enjoyment, but even still whenever I got called up I couldn't help smiling. And not wanting to seem proud I tried to keep a straight face. For some reason when I was 8 I associated smiling for an achievement to be gloating with pride. I don't know. Anyway, I couldn't do it. My body wanted to smile and I would end up grinning like the Cheshire cat everytime. This happened today when I saw those three basset hounds being walked. I just could not stop smiling. Even now as I type this I'm sitting here smiling just thinking about them.

When I got home tonight I wanted to walk around the pond. In the community I live, we have a section of town houses which are for the most part populated by newly budding families. So you have young couples who have a few children. If they didn't have the children they wouldn't be in the town house. And it can be amusing walking by because you get to watch all the neighborhood children running around playing with each other. I find it cute, and there's a huge racial diversity living her so it's nice to see all these different breeds (they're sorta like puppies) getting along. As I was walking by that section I heard a little girl crying and as I got closer I saw that she had fallen off her bicycle. Now I was on the phone with my balloon animal friend, but I decided I should probably go and make sure she wasn't going to die. Afterall, I had just come from Confession and didn't feel like going back for a sin of omission. So I go up there, and ask her if she's alright. My heart melted talking to her, because she's a sobbing mess as I approach, but to answer me I could tell she was trying to compose herself by sniffling back her tears and runny nose and as with a big a voice as she could muster she said "uh-huh". Not believing her, I then asked if she needed any help. She again choked back the tears and said her sister was getting her Dad. I said okay, and told her I was going to pick her bike up off the ground for her. That made me chuckle a bit. The bike was a wreck. The kickstand was completely broken, and the handlebars were bent. It reminded me of the many tremendous bike accidents I had as a kid. Then remembering those accidents, I looked to see if she was wearing a helmet. Of course she was because we baby kids nowadays. I stood with her for a minute and then saw her Dad come out. I waved and he waved back and I continued on with my walk. At that point she stopped trying to act all brave and started crying again, reached out her arms to be picked up, and started crying "Daddy, daddy." It was extremely cute.

One of my more memorable bike accidents was also the most recent one. I think it was my senior year of high school. My job was lawn mowing, and I typically mowed for realtors in the city I lived in because they paid well for my point of view and I charged less than the big landscaping companies. Plus I always did great work and they liked that. This time around I had gotten a call that there was a yard on my block which needed to be cut. I went over there with the lawn mower and found the grass was just too tall and it wouldn't be possible with my mower. In the process I did try to take a swipe at the grass, and wound up making a mess of things. So I took the mower back home and got a broom so I could sweep up the grassy mess I made on the little path going from the house's driveway to the front door. Now since the house was just down the street, I decided rather than driving down to it with the broom, I would just ride my bike there with the broom in hand. While riding there, I decided that this would be the perfect time to pretend I was the wicked witch from the West. I took the broom with both hands and angled it parallel with the ground so it looked like I was flying. And for a few seconds it worked wonderfully. Then the broom head dropped a bit and got caught in my back spokes. At this point I literally was flying. It was quite impressive I flipped over the handle bars, but my leg got caught in my bike chain. This caused the bike to fall on top of me. But I lived to tell the tale.