The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I know I have mentioned it to the point of overkill, but I truly hate the cold. Tonight, as I sat outside the gym, I had the hardest time getting up the umph to get out of the car. I just sat there in the car with the heat and radio on trying to justify getting out, getting cold, and going into a crowded place to pick up heavy things. Now that I am not doing the Crossfit classes and am getting to enjoy watching my ET body morph back into its original form, I have had a hard time pushing myself without a team around me. I know that all I have to do is miss a day and then I will have permission to miss another and the snowball starts and I will end up being shaped like a snowman. No, I had to make myself go. I got inside and went to the locker room , got undressed, opened my gym bag and realized that I had forgotten my clothes. Now that’s a defining moment. I may or may not have let out a “wordy dird” when I realized that I had forgotten my clothes and a stranger (Satan) standing beside me asked, “What’s wrong?” I told him that I had forgotten my clothes and that I guess I was just going to have to skip working out today. He responded, “I’ve done that before, good thing Goodwill is just a few doors down…I mean, if you really want to work out.” Great, there went my excuse. I knew that if I went home to get clothes that I would never leave the house again. So, I decided to slide down a couple of doors and find my bargain workout gear (and give back to the community).

Armed with a twenty dollar bill, I started with the pants as I could tell that they had a lot more t-shirts than sweat pants (I mean, they had to match, right?) The pants were mixed in with the dress pants so finding the appropriate size was not the easiest thing I have ever done. I found lots of MC Hammer sweats that were shiny and had elastic at the bottom. After going down ever single aisle of pants, I realized there was only one pair that was my size and not from the 80’s. They were navy blue with bright yellow stripes down the side. The t-shirt was easy as I found one the exact same color with yellow words on it. I looked at the time on my phone and realized that an hour had passed since I had first pulled into the parking lot at the gym. I had gotten completely lost in my retail therapy while scanning the aisles for the perfect workout clothes that someone had deemed not even worthy to have in their house or even in their garage in a box.  Yes, an hour had passed because I had gotten caught up in the hunt…I was Goodwill hunting.

I got  back to the locker room and put on my recycled sweat gear (wow when you say it like that….) and those pants…..they were Old Navy pants made from that material that doesn’t stretch and looks waterproof. I have never in my life seen pants with legs so wide! I didn’t notice it until I put them on. I can literally fit my entire body into one leg. I just looked like a square…I was Sponge Bob Square Pants. I put on my “matching“ t-shirt and  noticed a little fur on it. I know these clothes are supposed to be washed but this one may have Hoodini’d its way through the system. As I slid the shirt over my head, I noticed a light Febreeze scent mixed with a little…what was that….I had smelled that before….Hello Kitty that was cat pee! Oh yeah, no doubt about it. I guess there are reasons other than “this doesn’t fit any more” for people to dump their clothes off at a bin in a parking lot. It didn’t matter, at this point I was committed…the scent was faint…and I’ve smelled much worse at the gym.

I saw a couple of people that I knew while I was there but I stayed at arm’s length just in case I was not the only bloodhound in the crowd. I had this fear that if I got hot and sweaty (who am I kidding) that like a scented candle when it is lit, I too would become more aromatic. As the workout slowly progressed (no drops of sweat occurred) my Perrynoia got the best of me. I also couldn’t stop looking in the mirror at my wide pants. 

I decided to get on the rowing machine before going home as I could hear the dinner bell ringing and this Febreeze scented cat was getting hungry. I did a full seven minutes and that is all it took to heat up and unleash the essential oils locked deep inside the fibers of my discounted fitness attire.

I got back to my car and fired up the heater on high for the rest of the ride home. You know those cedar tree air fresheners that people used to dangle from their rearview mirrors? Well , if they made one that looked like a litter box, that is what should have been dangling from my mirror. Oh my word, “Febreeze-kitty” is not pleasant. I had a flashback of my Prius that I bought up in Ashville, North Carolina in about five degree temperature. I remember telling them to save me some money and not detail the car as I would do that myself. When I got there it was late at night and the wind chill was about twenty below. The salesman mentioned to me that he had ten cats at home that he needed to get to back to so we would only take a short test drive.  I noticed his jacket looked like a cat bed. When we got into the Prius and drove around, I started getting a slight whiff of something; I assumed it was his fur lined jacket. After getting the car home and taking out the paper floor mats, I noticed there was a dark red/brown stain in the passenger floorboard. I also noticed that there was some kind of red/brown liquid that had dried between the upper and lower passenger seat. As the summer heated things up, it got to the point that if I left my car out in the heat for a long time, I had to roll the windows down for a while just to handle the smell…the dead body smell. I can’t prove it but the red/brown, the great deal, the smell that could absolutely take a person’s breath away, the fact that the person who owned the car last only had it for three months and put 30,000 miles on it…oh yeah, something was up in that car’s history that Carfax and that salesman was afraid to tell. I spent a lot of money on gallons of solutions to neutralize my hybrid hearse but nothing could kill that smell….poor choice of words.

So now I have clothes that I will never wear again. Just like my former Prius owner, I will put these clothes right back into the system for someone else to enjoy. Now that I have had time to think about it, my little shopping spree made no sense at all. I could have gone home and back by the time it took me to track down my Sponge Bob/litter box ensemble but for some reason I was thinking that I was saving money. I didn’t save money; I threw $8 away. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, Satan…Satan in the locker room giving me bad ideas and pushing me to make poor choices….sneaky little devil. Tomorrow I will give back to my community by donating some workout clothes to a bin in a parking lot. Yes, I give back…I will give back a gift that keeps on giving.