First of all, Laylee says today is Ducky’s birthday. Either it’s a desperate ploy to get cake or she just loves him and wants him to have a special day. Either way — CUTE! This is his 3rd birthday so far this month. My, he’s aging gracefully.
In other news, I feel like I got hit by a truck. My friend Sandra and I started walking again this morning. After a 4 month break while my hips relocated themselves somewhere around my pelvic region, we’re at it again. We get up at *like 6:30am and walk for health and friendship in the ‘crisp’ fall air. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and we say we love it when we’re not actually doing it and somehow we’re crazy enough or guilt-ridden enough to get up each morning and not leave the other person waiting in the dark.
We always pass an impossibly tiny miniature woman who must be training for a marathon so hard that she has lost all of her actual flesh. We like Tiny Woman and it was comforting to see her this morning after so many months apart. There is also the little old man with the cane who shuffles along and greets us with a cheerful grin. We see him at the playground some mornings doing exercises on the swings.
One of my neighbors walks nearly all the time to control her depression, however she’s always cheerful and nice to me when I see her out and about, sometimes with hand weights, sometimes freestyle. She waves and smiles from under her green hooded jacket.
The strangest of all is purple-shirt-man. He runs every morning (I’m talking about real-morning, sometime around 10:00am, not why-are-you-sick-enough-to-be-walking-in-the-MIDDLE-OF-THE-BLEEPIN-NIGHT-?-morning) past my house……over and over and over again. I’ve counted him doing it as many as 10 times in one stretch and those are just the times I happen to glance over and see him. I don’t spend all day staring out the front window like a zombie. He has really good posture, too good posture. He never smiles and never moves his torso. He wears a skin-tight purple shirt and stares straight ahead.
During the weeks following Magoo’s birth when my anxiety was really high, I was truly scared of purple-shirt-man, thinking he was stalking our house. But then I realized that he never looks our way, or any way for that matter. I’m not sure if he’s a person or just some sort of bot, running a circle around our block to advertise purple shirts. I’ll try to take a picture of him some time.
In the mean time, I’d love to hear your stories of interesting people you’ve seen roaming around your neighborhood. Tell me about them and you will get…..a ducky birthday cookie.
*6:30 is when the alarm goes off for the first time. I don’t actually get out the door until around 6:50.
Our neighbourhood (‘ou’ for the naturally born Canadian in you) is in the lovely city of St. Louis. Filled with students, low income families and wierd people perhaps related to the low income families. I particularly enjoyed when a man begged me for money at 7AM (whilst I was morning walking). He pleaded with me to give him money for fast food since he just got out jail and if I didn’t give him money he would be forced to steal and go back to jail. That is a lot of pressure to put on a young mom at such an early hour in the morning.
One question I would like to ask my neighbours is- “If you can’t figure out how to operate the turn signal, what makes you think you can operate the rest of the car?”
One of my favourite things to watch my fellow students in Provo do is chase one another. Girls chase the boys, boys get freaked out and run the other way, or start spending alot of time in the library or in their bedrooms where the girls either won’t find them or will have such a hard time finding them that if by some odd chance the boy is found, he is so impressed that he proposes to the girl on the spot, ’cause hey – she’s showing commitment. When the boys chase the girls, the girl either hides somewhere obvious, (like right at the boy’s side – and looking fabulous I might add) or she slaps a restraining order to keep him from stalking her. Yup, that’s my neighbourhood.
There was an old Ukranian grandma sleeping on a bench while her ward played happily in the stroller in front of her. This doesn’t normally happen in the suburbs.
You know I really struggled with the spelling of neighbourhood. Thanks for satisfying that urge Cyn.
We have staring, waving man in our neighbourhood. 🙂 He sits on his porch across from our house staring at everyone coming in and going out and calls out and waves. In your anxiety days you’d have DIED. He is actually very nice, but I’m still a little weirded out. One time staring / waving man came up to me to talk to me about my little girl. It was a little disconcerting at best. He made me really spooked because he was hiding one hand behind his back through the whole interview. 🙂 Scary! It turns out he just didn’t want me to see the cigarette he was smoking.
I’ve just come from the ducky link.
for my neighborhood characters
http://blackbird17.blogspot.com/2004/11/long-walk_17.html