It’s my habit to take a long walk in the morning. At first, I only walked a half a mile each morning. But each week I increased it by one half a mile. After five weeks and I was up to five and a half miles a day. I think this is my limit for the time being. I keep a fairly quick pace, and so after the first two miles, my legs start to cramp up. This is my signal to keep walking faster until the cramps subside. And I don’t stop until I reach five- and one-half miles on my pedometer.
Park
I’m sure you are thinking but why are you telling me this? Could this be more boring? Honestly, it could become quite mundane. But it isn’t, and the reason is this. Every day when I take a walk, something weird happens. Or I meet someone that I knew in the past and haven’t seen for years. Sometimes I meet someone unbelievably interesting or horrifyingly strange.
How is that possible? I’m glad you asked. I have absolutely no idea how it is possible. I only know that it is god’s own truth. Let me begin by telling you that I’m an ordinary person. I’m middle-aged. Not breathtakingly beautiful or hideous. Just average, at least to look at.
I have lost about fifteen pounds over the course of the past six months since I started walking. I have what used to be called dirty brown hair with a touch of gray. I think I look somewhat younger than my age, which is forty-two. When young I was known for my deep dimples. Unfortunately, as I grew older, the once adorable dimples turned into wrinkles.
But within me, I have always believed I was special, highly intelligent, and creative. I’m really funny in a sarcastic, snarky kind of way. I’m often the center of attention at parties. And to be perfectly honest, for some reason, weird people are attracted to me.
Here’s an example to prove my point. This happened years ago. I was shopping at this store. that no longer exists. It was called Edmond’s Scientific. It was a manufacturing company that made scientific glass and telescopes and similar items for laboratories.
But within the four walls of Edmond’s Scientific outlet store was very diverse, and might I say an odd assortment of objects for sale beside the scientific glassware. They sold science kits for all the nerdy science kids, seashells and bones and rocks of every kind, fossils and toy dinosaurs and mirrors that distorted your image. And random gadgets that I could never ascertain their purpose.
I was always attracted to the picture books of oddities. I always found things like Siamese twins who had one body but two heads or sheep with one eye fascinating. Stuff like that, yes, that’s a little odd. But if we were all completely candid, we would admit we have an attraction to all things weird and unconventional.
But I digress, that day while I was cruising the isles of Edmund Scientific, a middle-aged man comes over to me and starts talking rapidly. He kept asking me if I would be interested in going to a nearby flea market with him where he sold things to make money.
I was barely able to focus on what he was saying because I am transfixed by his appearance. He was shorter than I, and I’m about five feet with heels. He had a slack but somehow animated face. Which is an odd combination, I know? But true nonetheless. He had a unibrow that went from one side of his forehead to the other. He had a scrawny goatee that is white and braided. And an earring that was a shrunken head. And the really fascinating thing was the ring of toothpaste around his mouth. It was gross, and yet I couldn’t stop staring at it. As I thought, does he know that is on his face? Doesn’t he feel it? Did he look in the mirror after brushing? I had an irresistible urge to wipe his face off with a handi-wipe. At the same time, I wanted to get as far away as possible.
I am always been confronted by these two conflicting but irresistible feelings. Being attracted and repelled at the same time. I chose to run swiftly out the door and into my car. And drove away as quickly as it’s possible. I often wonder if I am somehow inviting this type of attention. But if I am, I didn’t know the mechanism. Nor how to stop it.
Anyway, I digress, since I first start going to Washington Park I went very early in the morning. In the late Spring, that was about six AM. I found that about eighty percent of the people who go out at first light are very mundane, and the other twenty percent of them are quite odd. There are groups of buff young men that go to play tennis. I have to admit I stop and watch them for quite a while. Although I am almost middle-aged, I’m still breathing. What can I say?
Then there are the people who meet every morning in the parking lot and then walk in groups. They keep up at a fairly decent clip but aren’t averse to stopping and talking quite animatedly if someone is telling an exciting bit of gossip or story. These groups are usually of retirement age.
Then there are the older men who usually come alone and walk alone. I often say hi to these guys and everyone else for that matter but they rarely, if ever say hello back. In general, they prefer to keep human contact to an absolute minimum.
There’s a young woman that uses roller blades. She is quite athletic looking and wears tight clothes that are apparently meant to be aerodynamic. Her hair is short and very blond. I can’t emphasize how I envy her youth, athletic ability, and low body fat. In the time it takes me to travel around the park one time, she has gone around three times. I wave each time she passes me, but she’s wearing headphones and is apparently in the zone. And does not seem to be aware of the people around her.
One day I decide to go through the woods trail to increase the difficulty and calorie-burning effect of my experience. It was somewhat dark in the woods because of the trees. As I entered the dense canopy area, I hear a rustling in the woods. I was squinting at the tree-lined area, and I see what I believed to be two men running towards me at a very quick pace. I became momentarily frightened because I thought I was the only woman walking in the woodsy area in the early morning. As they were coming closer, I begin to scream at the top of my voice. Thinking I was about to be murdered or raped.
I hear them right behind me and quickly turn my head in that direction. And it is at this point I realize that the men that are chasing me were not men at all. But a deer rushing through the woods in my direction. I don’t know if I was more relieved or more embarrassed. And my main concern was that no one had seen me act like a hysterical woman. I am completely out of breath and sweating like nobody’s business. I stop to catch my breath. And then I start laughing hysterically. I realize that it was the best workout that I ever had.
As I was saying before I went off on that tangent. I am so inspired by the young blond woman on rollerblades that I decide to purchase my own skates. Also, I buy a helmet and knee pads. As a child, I learned to skate using the old fashion type of skates that you wore over your shoes and are tightened with a key.
If you made a sudden stop, the skates would come off the front of your shoe. And you would trip and fall on your knees if you put your hands out. If not, you would fall flat on your face. I was not particularly athletic, and most often I fell flat on my face. Either way, you chipped your front teeth or skinned your knees. I spent most of my early childhood with what was called road rash — heavily scabbed knees.
When I was in my early teens, I would walk downtown in Maple Shade, NJ, where I grew up, and catch the bus in front of the police station. For a quarter, you could take the bus to the Riverside Roller Rink. My friends and I would go there every Saturday morning and skate for three hours for fifty cents. I have to admit my skating skills never really improved. I always came home bruised and battered and scraped. But it was great fun.
So, my initial rollerblading experience at Washington Lake Park was not a complete success. I found that rollerblading on the cement sidewalk is not as easy as it looks. And there were many parts of the path that went uphill. I barely made it up those hills. And then there are the inevitable one hundred miles an hour hair raising trip downhill.
One day an older couple in their late sixties kept yelling at me.” Come on you can go faster than that.” I gave them the Italian salute. I can’t say I blame them because they passed me walking at a somewhat leisurely pace.
I was fifty years old when I decided to try rollerblading. This is probably not the best time in life to try rollerblading. You have neither the agility nor energy to keep up with the lithe young women in their early twenties as I found out. The other factor that I failed to take into consideration was that I did not know how to stop skating.
You’re supposed to point the toe of the skate down and this slows you down. And you slowly come to a complete and safe stop. Unfortunately, I did not know this. And the only way I was able to stop was to skate onto the grass and then fall over.
At this point, I decided to try rollerblading at a skating rink. So, one beautiful sunny day, I drove to the self-same Riverside Roller Rink I used to go to as a kid and went skating. And believe it or not, I was doing fabulously. Right up until the point where I start going very fast, and suddenly, I found my legs going up in the air. And you guessed it, my rear end went down. Hard. I couldn’t get up. I was in agony. I crawled over to the side of the roller rink and sat down and cried like a baby. And believe it or not, not one person came over to ask if I was alright. It turns out that I broke my tailbone. I wasn’t able to sit on a chair for six months. That was the end of my journey to be a skater.
As I was explaining before I went off on that tangent. One day I was walking through the woodsy part of the park, and I noticed a young woman pushing a baby carriage. She was staring down at the ground. As I walked past her, I asked her,” what are you looking at?”
“There’s a snake over here, and I’m afraid to walk past it. “
“Snake you say, I don’t think so. I’ve been coming to this park for a long time, and I’ve never seen any snakes. But there are no dangerous snakes in this part of NJ.”
So, I walk over to the “snake” and pushed it with my foot. And say,” See, it’s just a stick.” And then the “stick” started moving and made its way onto the grass and away. The young woman looks at me with an air of superiority and walks quickly away. I say,” “whoops” to myself. And walk away.
Overall my time spent walking in the park was a positive experience. The main problem I have is dealing with my own paranoia. And the fact that I want to engage every person I see in some way big or small. I guess I’m both a paranoid and overly friendly person at the same time. I’m both the Yin and the Yang. But then aren’t we all to some degree. We are a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions. My final advice is, get your ass in gear and enjoy the rays. But, watch your back.
