A Walk In The Park

The beauty of living in my town is the diversity of people surrounding me.

I pass an elderly woman whenever I go to play tennis.  She is stick thin, wearing more make up on her face than meat on her bones, but she walks resolutely down the middle of the street near the park.  Round and round and round she plods, coming from some unknown place with a destination only she can imagine.

Yesterday I passed what looked like a posse of misplaced Texans in the Heartland.  Four people wearing cowboy hats and western jeans walking down the sidewalk in a sort of loose formation, arms swinging, feet planted with great purpose.  Who they were pursuing I’ll never know, but their youthful shirts indicated that it might be some musical group whose tastes were probably dissimilar to mine.

This morning I passed grey hairs like myself.  Old silverbacks trotting around the mall at speeds I never want to attain!  Accompanied by spouses with one of two extreme faces, either unmitigated joy, or abject pain and I thought about how life does that to us.  How we either embrace what is or it swallows us up.

I plodded on, listening to The Iliad, starting in the park and finishing in the mall as rain fell harder and faster, assaulted by canned music trying to drown out my story in the latter.  And while I walked amid the accouterments of modern consumerism I listened to the tales of ancient war, but the stories, the people, the behaviors were really not much different than those I am used to.

For all our striving and all our pretenses, we really are the same people we’ve always been.