Summer in the South we get these crazy storms, especially lately with all the hurricane residual. You lay in bed at night and just listen to it blow, rain pouring off the gutters, too much water to be channeled all at once, lightning is almost always somewhere in the sky most evenings, thunder that makes you clutch the sheets a little tighter. After, the morning is glassy and green, grass shines and trees glimmer.
And then comes the heat. And the evaporation. The steambath. As the thermometer creeps up towards 90, all that rain turns into a haze which, though I grew up in North Carolina, drains me in ways to which I may never grow accustomed.
So, I walk down to the coffeeshop and sit in the shade. I've got my cigarettes and a brand new copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. Funny though, I don't read much there. I sit in the shade and I play my storyteller's game, you know the one, where you watch strangers over the top of your book, avoid eye contact and make up little stories about them, fictional personal histories, just for fun. For instance, the fat guy with the Elvis hair and flip-flops. What's his story? Maybe I'll listen to the two German girls whose every sentence sounds clipped and hateful. I'll watch and I'll eavesdrop and make up little stories for myself. Most people I've met do this as well. It's fun.
Anyway, about this time, loping down the busy avenue, in bright Lycra or some other non-cotton material, are the runners. It's sweltering, but here come the runners. Two of them. A man and a woman, ghoul-like in their lack of any body fat whatsoever. Their every muscle is taut, even their neck muscles are straining. It's sweltering, let me remind you.
The first thing I notice is my initial dislike of these people as they pass. The second thing is my psychological check on this unfounded dislike. What's not to like? Yet, my eyes slide sideways and I am filled with defensiveness and contempt. Which makes me slightly uncomfortable. Which makes me smoke more. We all kill ourselves in different ways, my brain seethes at them as they move down the road, out of sight.
Ashamed of my flat-out judging instinct, I attempt to make up a little story about the runners and find that I cannot do it. I just can't. What are they running from? Obesity? Dissatisfaction? Maybe they really like running? Who, I ask, really likes running? In this heat? Someone, I answer, just not you.
Me explaining the story of the 90 degree runners is llike me trying to tell a story from a gardenia's perspective, or a rhino. It's too foreign. That explains, at least to me, my initial distrust. It must be how poor whites feel about blacks. Or how the Lexus drivers feel when they get lost and stuck at a stoplight in Southeast DC. Mistrust based on misunderstanding based on ignorance. And I wonder if this what makes the world go round. And I wish I could talk to those runners and tell them what I've figured out, make them understand.
Of course, they've long-since moved out of sight and so I go back to watching the three girls giggling over a pitcher of sangria. And I make up another story.
