Weird New Oldness

My mornings are usually bereft of convention.

Most people have a routine. They wake up, shower, brush their teeth, drink their coffee, kiss their wives/husbands/significant others and go off to work. All at the same time, for the most part, each day.

These day-in, day-out routines are how hit men make their bread and butter, incidentally.

This morning, as per usual, my day was thrown off course by a phone call from a City inspector advising me he wanted to confirm the number of windows at a property we handle. Since the property is close to my apartment -- within ten blocks -- I agreed to meet him on my way to work. Once he did what he needed to do, he split and I opted for the bus, which was right there, in favor of a cab.

I settled into a seat and fired up the iPod, and opted for some people-watching. A host of people got on at the next stop, and the weirdest thing happened; an older woman, probably 65 or 70, slowly climbed the stairs and stepped through and took a seat. Why weird? I watched her, and it felt like I could see the young person that she used to be, and it freaked me out.

Before you, dear reader, suggest I take a vacation at a local sanitarium, I didn't have an episode or anything bizarre; it just hit me, like Bender describing fat girls named Claire in The Breakfast Club, that I could see her in her younger years and how age had slowed her and changed her appearance, but otherwise I could envision how this woman looked in her younger years.

I'm not sure if that means I'm weird, or if I'm suddenly into oooooolder women; likely none of those things applies here. But it did hit me as strange as I reached this conclusion. Just a very odd experience.

I apologize if reading about it is as boring and disinteresting as it was weird for me to see it live; but it was something I wanted to chronicle. Why, I'm not sure; I think it somehow either suggests I'm getting older, or maybe she reminded me of someone I once knew, or perhaps I was really, really, really bored this morning. What I think, in retrospect, was that she was a nice-looking woman who reminded me of my grandmother, and somehow it triggered some neuron in my brain (one of seven remaining) and that's where all this came from.

I also could have just opted to not include it here, but I'm rarely one to shy away from brutal honesty, and I'm not planning on scoping out the babes at the Shady Pines Retirement Center; then again, the night is young and it IS Bingo night...

If I'm not back by midnight, don't wait up... :)