There Is One In Every Crowd

Since I spend some portion of nearly every day walking through the State Park, I've come to know a few faces. Not names, just faces. I regularly exchange pleasantries with the lady who helped me rescue the cat. She is forever removing moss from her patio.  I stop and talk to the couple in the whimsical purple cottage with the three enormous dogs and the chihuahua and who adopted the cat. There is a painfully skinny, miserable-looking woman with perfect red lipstick who passes me going the other direction who smiles at me now that we've bumped into each other 100 times. There are the three retired men who walk and talk baseball every day, each one wearing a different baseball team's shirt. The one in the Phillies gear always says has something nice to say. There is a man with a walking stick who has a comb-over and moon-shaped face so similar to those belonging to my old boss that I think about asking him his name each time I see him.

And there are other familiar people and dogs who simply smile as they pass, or ask a question about a trail closure or downed tree or whatnot. It is a fairly friendly crowd. What's not to be happy about? We're all out in a gorgeous park, surrounded by the best nature has to offer and getting a good workout.

So one day, on my second lap around the loop, an older gentleman stopped me by waving his hand and speaking. Nothing unusual.

I can't hear with tunes cranking on my iPod, so I pluck out an earbud and smile, asking him to repeat himself.

Since a section of the trail I was on had recently been closed for a time, and I was coming from that direction, I assumed he had a question about passage through that area.

Wrong.

It starts out benignly enough.

"I passed you a while ago, are you doing two laps?"

I answer that I was about to finish my second lap. I should have just kept moving.

He begins to tell me a long story about his weight loss journey and how walking saved his life by strengthening his heart. He used to walk 365 days a year in a nearby National Park until he fell down and embankment and injured his back and nearly drowned in the creek because he couldn't move.

I am immediately wishing I hadn't stopped and taken out the earbud. I can't decide whether he is just a desperately lonely old windbag or a weirdo with no social graces.

I am distracted by my own thoughts enough that I miss a few run-on sentences and he moves on to the topic of his wife, God rest her soul. They'd be married some outrageous number of years if she hadn't up and died one day.

And somehow the tale of his suffering wife and her life of hard work (and boring conversation) morphs into one of his military career, the details of which are nebulous enough to make me think he did something kooky, landed in the brig, and was dishonorably booted into civilian life involuntarily.

At one point he must have realized that he was doing all of the talking, (and that I was glazing over...and backing up) or maybe he decided he'd charmed me enough, but he stops, takes a breath (his first in 5 while minutes) and asks a question.

"So what's your situation?"

"My SITUATION?" I inquire, somewhat shocked by the question.

"Yes. Are you married? Is there a man taking care of you?"

And immediately I am making mental notes for my description to the police.