Outside

We are walking and I am wearing my big hood because I lost my red hat and it’s cold and we’re moving along the El tracks and we just barely hear someone say 'excuse me' and we step to the side and wait because our hood has given us no sense of anyone behind us and nobody comes right away and so we stay to the side and wait and it’s a hooded figure-a woman and she passes us and gets about 3 feet ahead and mumbles something and we think, oh, she must have one of those phone-in-her-ear sorta things because she’s tossing a complete sentence into the air but not in our direction and we keep trudging ahead watching for ice and suddenly she says,"You can go to hell for all I care" and we say what? Are you talking to me? Because we are sure she is not.

How does a person work their way from ‘excuse me’ to ‘go to hell’ without the appropriate provocation? I mean, we did step aside, did we not? And she says,"You heard me." And I say, What? Because we have this giant hood thing on our heads so I can't hear but for some reason we don’t want to miss out on the roots of the attack. Ya know. Like for the police report or the mini-series or what have you.

I pause, think momentarily of what The Shish would say and ask, "Are you having some sort of really bad day or something?" (which breaks one of my own personal laws-Number Seven, Don't negotiate with idiots) She stops, turns and spits out, Don’t. You. Mock. Me.

And now I'm trying to get another woman who has approached from the opposite direction, wearing a fur coat, I'm trying to get her on our side even tho 29 seconds ago we didn’t even have a side except in terms of what we were having for dinner as opposed to what we thought we should be having, so I make a face like, am I crazy or is this woman insane? Can I get a witness or what? And fur lady slides a nervous look over the whole scene, looks down and races away and we think.

We think.

And all of a sudden we pause and think we’d better stop-even tho a large portion of us wouldn’t mind shoving her sorry ass really hard which borders on a totally inappropriate response considering we’re not sure exactly when the trouble started but we have enjoyed the interaction the same way our grandparents in Florida used to try and keep the dialer's of wrong numbers on the telephone long enough to give them a stern talking to about dialing more carefully and then they’d take that discussion as far into the 4:00 in the afternoon cocktail hour as they could manage because the days pass slowly in a lawn chair.
---
Ha ha. Can you tell it's my writing night?