Are you ever just standing some where, waiting or watching or browsing, and someone starts talking to you? This is my life, all the time. And one of the reasons I think I’d make a great bartender, by the way.
Yesterday, while waiting in line to buy dog food, a tall woman who I’d guess was in her mid-forties, with perfect hair and a New York accent straight out of central casting started talking to me. She and her husband own a house here but are only here part time. I couldn’t help but adore how friendly she was. She was on her way home from shopping with a friend and, thinking much like I was, decided to stop and get dog food because “Whaaaatt? This weather. Ya just neva know what it’s going do to, am I right?”
I agreed. “You know, it was a day a lot like today,” she went on. The day she and her husband met. Apparently, she in her father’s 1978 Ford and he in “the most beautiful truck you have ever seen” were just turning off “The Bridge” when the snow and the ice and the fog were just too much and somehow, some way, without either of them “touching so much as a fender of another vehicle” ran directly into each other. Both, “thank the good Lord [crosses self] above,” were uninjured.
After thanking the good Lord and composing herself, she then tied her scarf around her head, exited her vehicle, traipsed through the snow and began screaming at the man that ran into her. He could not get a word in, even asking if she was alright was out of the question. Before they knew it, they were surrounded. “Caring drivers in New Jersey, can you imagine?” Soon, reportedly because it was early in the storm, a police officer joined them. It was unclear who was at fault and the pair, neither willing to tell the entire story, were both cited for reckless driving and were each sent on their way with a ticket and a court date.
A month later, refusing to be at fault, she walked into that court house fuming just as much as on that cold winter evening. Coming around the corner, looking down to adjust her skirt, she crashed right into him again. This time, she didn’t yell at him. She just smiled and “took the sign.”
“Our first date was coffee after appearing in court. So romantic, right?” Yes. I’d have to say, pretty much, yes.
Sure, nothing is perfect. It could be exaggerated or romanticized. I could have just been in the mood for a good story. But none of that really matters. What matters is now I’ve heard it and I know something like that happened. I can’t unhear it. So when people ask me why I think the way I do, why I believe things that might seem silly to some— that’s why.
Am I right?
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