These days, I really do spend quite a bit of time alone. I work at my computer or I write or I wash dishes, and sometimes I don’t really see or talk to anyone beyond my family all day.
Also, normally, I don’t take my sweaty, just-worked-out self out into the world. I sweat in the comfort of my own home or at the JCC. But today, as a little change of pace, I went directly from working out to doing a few errands, fragrant leggings be damned.
Perhaps I need to do that more often.
                          Approachable Me.
I don’t know what was going on with my aura today, but everywhere I went I was making friends. In the gym, the only other woman hefting kettlebells struck up a conversation, and before you know it we were skirting overshares about workout plans and bodily ailments.
After the workout, I headed to the grocery store. There I managed to not run into a lady who had paused for an extended cogitation session in the middle of the entryway. When she noticed that she’d stranded me, she rewarded me for being so polite by chit-chatting about how oblivious people are about their carts, and I managed to smile through it without pointing out the irony. So, yay me.
In fact, I believe my karma was rewarded, because my next interaction with a complete stranger was a lady who noticed I was carrying a bunch of apricots. It turns out that my family has a serious apricot problem, which is that they can’t walk past a bowl filled with apricots without eating one or two. We’d buzzed through ten of them in less than 24 hours, so I had to get more.
This woman speculated about the ripeness of the apricots and pointed out that they are high in vitamin A and good for the skin (I have no idea if this is actually true). Then she said that she wasn’t surprised I was buying so many apricots with my lovely skin. Why thank you, I said. I might have blushed if I weren’t still all pinked-up from my workout.
While I probably could have stayed at the store and made some more new friends (that’s just how the Co-op rolls), I had to hustle off to CVS to pick up some photos and poster board for tonight’s Working Group on Girls of Schenectady Celebration Dinner. There I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, and there was much, much to catch up on, so it was lovely to run into her, and we talked longer than we both meant to before hurrying along. But, in fairness, think she would have talked to me even if I weren’t sweaty and stinky.
