I have a nice little walk (except when it’s raining) from the huge state employee parking lot across the street and up the hill from the building that I work at. Those 3 or so precious minutes that I have to collect my thoughts and prepare for another exciting day at work are vital. It reminds me of the walk that I used to have my senior year of college from my car to my first class of the day where I would think about anything from what would be on the test that I had that day, what I would do for lunch, or the girl that I was obsessed with at the time. That morning walk became quite important to my mental health, and the one that I have now although it is quite a bit shorter is just as important.
For todays walk into work, there was 3 things that I noticed in particular.
1. As I was coming down the hill on the paved walkway I saw all the earthworms that had made it up onto the pavement to escape the ground that had become saturated with all the rain we have had lately. Unfortunately they did not make it back to the moist ground that is their natural habitat and ended up drying out on the pavement. For some reason this made me sad. I know it’s not an unusual sight, because I remember seeing dried up worms on the carport next to my house all the time when I was a kid, but I just feel so bad for the poor worms that worked so hard to escape drowning by finding a spot of pavement and crawling out onto to it only to let that be their downfall. I could faintly hear Taps playing in the background as I walked by all victims.
2. After I crossed the street by way of the cross walk that many motorist choose to completely ignore (that’s a whole nother blog post) I saw something quite interesting. There was a city bus that was waiting to turn out onto the road that I had just crossed and on the side of the bus was some kind of ad that I don’t remember that had a huge picture of a little white hatchback car on the side. The car was basically life size because it took up a large portion of the bus. Now here comes the amazing part. Right behind the bus, also waiting to turn out was a little white hatchback car that looked exactly like the one on the bus, and when I say exactly, I mean exactly. I really thought I was either going crazy, or that it was some type of extreme advertising where this car was following around the bus all day to make people look stare at it. I was going to pull out my phone to snap a picture because I knew a shot like that was one in a million but unfortunately the bus and the car drove away just as I was realizing what was happening.
3. Lastly, right as I was getting over the excitement of the bus/car happening and upset that I didn’t get a picture, I saw this older gentlemen coming out of the building with something just a little different about him. He was wearing a mask thing that was covering his mouth and nose. At first I thought that it was for some type of illness (or fear of illness) like that mask that you saw on the news during the SARS outbreak in China, but as I got closer the mask looked less and less like a surgical mask and more and more like a Hannibal Lecter mask. It was held on by these two huge rubber bands and didn’t really look like it was made out of paper. It looked more like hard plastic or something. It was the strangest thing. And now I start thinking to myself that I’m about to walk into the building that this guy just walked out of and he is either A: scared of some disease that he thinks is in the building that I’m about to go in, or B: he has some disease and is attempting not to spread it into the building that I’m about to go in. Neither of the options sounds good. Now I’m going to be washing my hands every 10 minutes and using my whole bottle of Purell.
