Driving into work yesterday morning, questioning as I do when driving in the dark the whole value of 'Daylight Saving' and springing forward and falling back with the clock, behind whatever those little Jeep things are. Not the Wrangler; I know what those are. I think they're called a Patriot or Compass or something like that. I leave as an open question for Jeep devotees (and our son is one) whether or not the small ones are even Jeeps.
No matter. We were traveling across Norwich long before dawn on the New London Turnpike which, as we head towards Three Rivers College and past the Ice Rink, is very much a residential area with lots of small, older houses and so you need to be mindful of your speed.
I'm so good at this mindfulness stuff I can be mindful of more than one thing at a time so while watching my speed behind the little Jeep, I could also spy her/his sticker for Planet Fitness on the lower right-hand side of the back window. It's a very successful nationwide chain of gyms, though unlike Jeep who slaps that label on everything they make, we don't call Planet Fitnesses (that would be the plural?) gyms, perhaps because they don't have basketball courts(?)
As my punctuation on the previous sentence suggests, I'm not sure why we have something called fitness centers when as kids growing up all we had were gyms. It's like sneakers. When we were kids, going to the gym, you had to wear sneakers to go anywhere near the basketball court. Yesterday, in the dark, behind the little Jeep with the fitness center sticker, I was wearing sports shoes that cost me over one hundred and thirty dollars (American dollars) on my way to work after having stopped at Planet Fitness.
I think you might now have a better understanding of why I have such a jaundiced eye about so much of what man hath wrought in the decades I've been watching. It's entirely possible that the person in the little Jeep had been in the same Planet Fitness that I was and was now heading to work as well, except they weren't because they hung a quick right at whatever that street is called with the Miller's Stamp Shop sign on the corner and continued on their merry way whereas I went to work which are not necessarily two mutually exclusive paths but, I wasn't feeling merry, if you follow my drift.
The reason I mention any of this is that just before the little Jeep hung the right and continued south towards Yonder or wherever, they opened their driver side window and threw a lit cigarette out and it bounced on the street in front of me and to my left. And, back to that mindfulness thing I'm good at, that caused me to wonder what the point of hitting the gym was if you continued to smoke. It's not like after four hundred miles on the treadmill, you'll get a new, pink lung (at least I don't think so).
From where I sit, behind the little Jeep in the dark on the way to work it's like cutting six inches off the front of the blanket and sewing it on the back and thinking you've added a foot to its length. On the other hand, after careful observation, I've concluded after decades of observation that God takes smokers and physical fitness fanatics in about equal number. Perhaps more, or less. I can't really tell because it's still early and I know not if it's dark outside or light.
-bill kenny
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