Heeeeey Essential Accessories

 

I went to a track that I haven’t been to in over a year

yesterday. It’s the one where the little old lady always show up before I can

get half way around the track just to say “Hey”. She has mastered this as she

walks in the opposite direction of the flow of walker traffic. I am sure this

goes on all day whenever a man shows up to get his walk on. She lives right

across the street in an apartment and from what I can tell, sits by the front

window, dressed and ready to go.

 

 

 

Usually she show up in hot pants and a really tight t-shirt

or tank top and some form of bedazzled flip flops and three essential accessories.

She surprised me yesterday. All I had time to do was park and get out of my car

and go less than half way around the track. I looked up and there she was,

almost halfway around the track in the opposite direction. As she neared me I

took in the new outfit. She had bought skinny jeans…very skinny jeans…and a

tube top. She might weigh 90 lbs  looked

like a pair of pliers walking towards me.

 

 

 

As she got near enough for my trifocals to focus, I saw her three

essential accessories:   a 32oz cocktail in one hand, a cigarette in

the other and a purse slung over the cigarette supporting arm. She sort of scoots along, dragging her flip flops along the track as

if  trying to scrape something off the

bottom of them at a pace of someone standing in line with a sort of “tail

tucked under” posture. She got close enough to speak and  let out a very deep, guttural “Heeeey” and

that was the end of her routine. I can’t help but notice every time I see her

that I am probably looking at the future of my skin in just a few years. She

has a tanned hide that only decades of no sunscreen and way too many trips to

the Chernobyl tanning beds of the 70’s could produce. I mentally put a “pick up

exfoliant and sunscreen” on my to-do list for the day.

 

 

 

I don’t know exactly where she went; she didn’t go straight

back home like she usually does. Instead, when I was coming around the end of

my first loop, she somehow showed back up again. She must have been hanging out

by the bushes or something. Anyway, she was suddenly walking in  front of me, going the same direction I was

walking in and was walking off through the grass leaving two crop circle-ish

stripes in the grass behind her with her dragging flip flops. I looked up and

noticed something different about her…something very different. Somehow, some

way, possibly Wal-Mart, QVC…I don’t know, but somewhere she had found some

padding. Yep, she was walking away with a bodacious Kim Kardashian /apple

bottom jeans, kind of look. What? It was one of the most bizarre things I have

ever seen on such a boney frame. I was trying to think positive and erase the

image from my memory banks all at the same time. I was trying to think “You go

Granny!” but I just couldn’t. Oh my word, that image is forever branded into my

brain. She really is a character right out of Greater Tuna. The image of that

overly tanned, scrawny woman in a tube top, skinny jeans and bedazzled flip

flops, slowly scooting around that track while carrying a large cocktail, a

cigarette and a purse, who now has “junk in the trunk” is not something that can just go

away…not without professional help. I can’t wait to go back.