Monday, July 25, 2005 his wonders to perform
There was a pair of men's athletic shoes sitting just outside the entrance to the bus shelter when I got out of work tonight. I just thought of this, but it may be an indication that the rapture came while I was in the beauty parlor. Internet community, please advise. Did this car become unmanned?
It is awkward to transition from the rapture to the jokes I had previously intended to write. I will begin again.
There was a pair of men's athletic shoes sitting just outside the entrance to the bus shelter when I got out of work tonight. I looked them over without picking them up. They seemed clean and undamaged, but I turned up my aristocratic nose at them. All of a sudden, I'm too good to wear shoes I find at the bus stop.
Just kidding. I could tell they were too big, and they had obviously been placed with such care that I didn't want to disturb them for frivolous reasons. Also, if I wasn't going to stick my feet into them and suspend my belief in germs and parasites long enough to do so, I couldn't find the inner strength to touch them.
Seconds later, a semi-ho(meless) man wearing a purple t-shirt and an enourmous silver crucifix on a chain around his neck came muttering up. "Will you look at that! And I have no shoelaces!" he said, joyfully, missing the forest for the trees. He scooped up the shoes and carried them into the shelter. "Hello, ma'am," he said, but he was just being polite. He only had eyes for the shoes. He sat holding them tenderly on his lap. "Well, this is going to present some difficulty," he said. He pulled at the laces on the mysterious shoes. Instead of traditional linear laces, these were technological marvels, a latice of elastic with no discernible way to detach them from their moorings.
"God works in mysterious ways, I say," he said. "Ain't that right, ma'am?"
"Yes," I said.
He took off his own shoes easily, because they had no laces, and held one of them up to one of the mystery shoes, sole to sole. I became concerned. "I don't know if that'll work. It looks like a squueze," I said, since the mystery shoes were obviously substantially smaller than the old ones.
"It might work," he said, "These are a ten and they have no laces, and these are nine." He smiled down at the shoes, and began to jam his right foot into one of them. "Mysterious ways," he said. He tugged at the heel and grunted, speaking between renewals of effort "People--ask me--people ask me, Jimmy--why do you wear--that cross?" One foot was indisputably inside one shoe. "It's because I believe in God," he said, and paused for breath. "Gotta believe in something, and I beleive in God," he repeated. "Met a man one time, and asked him what he believed in, and he said he beleived in the light bulb. I asked, what do you do--" here Jimmy began to address the problem of the second shoe. "What do you do when the lightbulb goes--" he lost the story. The shoe was too much. "This part is...broken? No! I'll stretch it," he said, and pulled the sides of the shoe hard in opposite directions.
He did the right thing, because after that, he did indeed put his foot inside it. "Mysterious ways!" he said. "It matches my pants!" He was right. The sleek black mystery shoes were far more compatible with his tapered-leg black jeans than the white, laceless hightops he had been wearing ever were. "People don't raise their kids goin' to church these days," he said.
I looked down the street for any sign of the bus, which of course there was not. I noticed that Jimmy resembled my also-possibly-psychotic property manager. He took a blue plastic comb from his pocket and thoughtfully combed his stringy blond hair. "Kids gotta have church," he said. "Shame not to."
"Mmm," I said.
"I go to church," he said.
I nodded.
"Do you go to church, ma'am?" he asked.
"There's my bus!" I said, and bounded out of the bus shelter, and onto the 61 that had just sailed out of nowhere to carry me home. Mysterious ways, indeed. posted by Frenz | 7/25/2005 08:29:00 PM
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