I blistered my arms and abs in the gym, did a few planks, played around with single-arm pullups on the offset machine (I still have to counterbalance more than half bodyweight on that, drat) and ran errands on my way home. I don’t actually like cake and its general extended family, but I will go a good stinky cheese or a pretty chatchka as a birthday treat.
There is a chain import shop next to the Trader Joe’s where I usually shop. I parked at the far end of the lot, trying to avoid some infestation of fund-our-cause panhandlers that was circulating with milk crates and righteous, earnest expressions. That meant I came up behind, instead of intersecting with, a long, skinny drink of water in stovepipe jeans with a red jacket and a pronounced limp.
My former candidate for office — the one whose campaign I managed, but whose ingratitude upon finding himself in the caricatured cast of my a-clef mysteries has now reached haptic proportions — limps like that. Pronounced, and distinctive. A drop of the right hip as the foot strikes on that side, owing to a knee rearranged by the bulkhead of a Huey in Vietnam. The left hip rolling up and forward, the shoulder above it higher to compensate. Not enough to constitute a lurch, more of a deck-gait on a choppy sea, but not something you see often.
The head of gray hair was right. I thought for a moment about the jacket. The guy had a positive zest for the shabby and unstylish, and I don’t think I ever saw him in anything other but leather brown and blue-jean tatter, except when he had to suit up for debates. As a matter of fact, he bought all his suits and dress shirts in thrift shops: “I just wait for some rich lawyer my size to kick the bucket, you can tell when the family’s brought in a whole wardrobe,” he would say with an unholy light of ghoulish parsimony in his eye.
Well, if he got it for his birthday or found the right weight and style in a thrift shop, maybe the cheap bastard would wear a red jacket.
I erred on the side of caution. Pier 1 is full of breakables, and the last time I crossed the guy’s path, he shouted profanities at me and seemed to be saying that I had gotten him into trouble with the TSA. It could have been some skinny older woman with a short no-nonsense haircut and an artificial hip, but I didn’t need chatchkas that much, and I wanted to quit on birthday surprises while I was ahead, and TJ’s does have Saint-Andre.
I was wondering if the town was really not big enough for the two of us until I realized we were in the next county over, anyway. The distraction meant that the panhandlers waylaid me and I had to get snarky.
Oh well.





