These are the People in my Neighborhood

First of all, Laylee says today is Ducky’s birthday. Either it’s a desperate ploy to get cake or she just loves him and wants him to have a special day. Either way – CUTE! This is his 3rd birthday so far this month. My, he’s aging gracefully.

In other news, I feel like I got hit by a truck. My friend Sandra and I started walking again this morning. After a 4 month break while my hips relocated themselves somewhere around my pelvic region, we’re at it again. We get up at *like 6:30am and walk for health and friendship in the ‘crisp’ fall air. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and we say we love it when we’re not actually doing it and somehow we’re crazy enough or guilt-ridden enough to get up each morning and not leave the other person waiting in the dark.

We always pass an impossibly tiny miniature woman who must be training for a marathon so hard that she has lost all of her actual flesh. We like Tiny Woman and it was comforting to see her this morning after so many months apart. There is also the little old man with the cane who shuffles along and greets us with a cheerful grin. We see him at the playground some mornings doing exercises on the swings.

One of my neighbors walks nearly all the time to control her depression, however she’s always cheerful and nice to me when I see her out and about, sometimes with hand weights, sometimes freestyle. She waves and smiles from under her green hooded jacket.

The strangest of all is purple-shirt-man. He runs every morning (I’m talking about real-morning, sometime around 10:00am, not why-are-you-sick-enough-to-be-walking-in-the-MIDDLE-OF-THE-BLEEPIN-NIGHT-?-morning) past my house……over and over and over again. I’ve counted him doing it as many as 10 times in one stretch and those are just the times I happen to glance over and see him. I don’t spend all day staring out the front window like a zombie. He has really good posture, too good posture. He never smiles and never moves his torso. He wears a skin-tight purple shirt and stares straight ahead.

During the weeks following Magoo's birth when my anxiety was really high, I was truly scared of purple-shirt-man, thinking he was stalking our house. But then I realized that he never looks our way, or any way for that matter. I’m not sure if he’s a person or just some sort of bot, running a circle around our block to advertise purple shirts. I’ll try to take a picture of him some time.

In the mean time, I’d love to hear your stories of interesting people you’ve seen roaming around your neighborhood. Tell me about them and you will get…..a ducky birthday cookie.

*6:30 is when the alarm goes off for the first time. I don’t actually get out the door until around 6:50.