Interactions

I walked this morning.  People were out everywhere.  Partly because I walked at just the right time.  Early enough to be cooler at the start and late enough for people to be up and moving.

Two women were moving into a house down the street.  They had the smallest moving truck and two hand trucks.  Interesting that both those things are called trucks, but more interesting to me were the women.  One was an older white woman, short, muscular, hauling that hand truck like she meant business.  The other was a younger tall black woman wearing a cap pulled down over her eyes and looking like some sort of misplaced model.  She was still working hard, hauling in a huge suitcase on wheels, lugging it up the steps.

People don't generally have a lot when they move in and out in my neighborhood.  We are mostly students and older women, people coming from, or going to.  Coming from homes that no longer exist, or where parents are waiting patiently.  Moving forward into new lives full of promises and hopes we hope are not just dreams.

At the park an elderly man sat on a bench watching me as I circled it seven times.  The second to last time he stopped me to ask if I had seen a shopping cart filled with cans and such.  I had!  It was about thirty feet away, just out of his eyesight behind a tree.  He thanked me, said he often forgot where he put it.  I put my earphones back in and took a few steps before he stopped me again.  Did I know what time it was?  Feeling slightly annoyed I stopped, thumbed through my phones different modes and told him it was 10:28.  He nodded smiling and turned around to resume his position.

I walked on feeling a little guilty.  Giving him the time of day was such a simple thing.  He looked like the kind of man who didn't get many things at all.  When I finished my three miles he was still sitting there surrounded by five fat squirrels digging for food.

On the way home a woman in a car called me over to ask if I knew where Roosevelt was.  I didn't, but felt compelled to tell her that if I knew how to use my phone I could have probably found it for her.  She smiled and held up her phone telling me she didn't know how to use it either.

I passed the women moving in again.  We nodded at each other and smiled.  Everyone does that here.  We all nod and smile, sometimes we even wave, but we hardly ever talk.  Maybe because my neighbor next door likes to talk.  She goes door to door telling the rest of us how she takes care of our yards, how she spends all her free time outside mowing and edging and picking up trash.

I wonder if everyone else feels the way I do about her?