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Pink and Chartreuse Socks

Sun, 3 Nov 2013, 12:34 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

1. Jonnie

A woman walked away from gate 10. She held a leash, and a pudgy, white, puggish-bullish dog was walking trotting along happily with her. I looked over with at the woman standing next to me. She raised her eyebrows.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she said. 

“They were at security when we went thru,” I said. “And the dog was loose, just walking around.”

The woman raised her eyebrows higher, and we began to chat about minor, miscellaneous things, the kind of treading-water conversation you have with someone standing next to you when you stand beside the designated stanchions waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight. Then they began boarding numbers B-31 thru -60.

As we walked down the gangway, I noticed the woman’s shoes.

“Are you running?” I asked. This was the weekend of the Marine Corps Marathon, and we were flying to Washington, D.C.

She looked back at me and smiled. “Yes! Are you?”

“No,” I said, “but we’ll be there cheering. What will you be wearing? Anything we can keep a lookout for?”

“Pink pressure socks,” she said. “Up to my knees.”

“I’m David, what’s your name?”

“Jonnie,” she said.

“We’ll be looking for you, Jonnie. Good luck!”

2. Cass

I walked to the back of the plane hoping to find two seats together.

“May I sit here,” I asked a woman seated along the aisle in one of the rows near the back. I pointed to the two seats next to her.

She smiled, nodded and stood up.

“I’m going to try to save a seat for my wife who’s further back,” I confessed. The woman smiled as she sat back down.

You see, the fair and industrious Trudy had arranged every detail of this trip, including checking in ahead of time, but our boarding passes were not consecutive. She told me she checked me in first to get the better boarding number, but she warned me that I’d have to try to save a seat for her.

I watched nervously as passengers continued to walked towards the back of the plane. And then there before me was Trudy.

“It’s my wife!” I said to the woman, relieved that I didn’t have to tell anyone they couldn’t have that seat.

The woman got up. Trudy sat down. We buckled ourselves in and leaned back in the seats.

“I met a woman who is running on Sunday,” I said to Trudy.

The woman in the aisle seat heard this and leaned forward. “Are you two running Sunday?”

“No,” said Trudy. “We’re visiting a friend.”

“But we’ll be out there on Sunday cheering,” I added. “What will you be wearing? Anything we can keep a lookout for?”

She smiled and said, “Pink or chartreuse socks.”

“I’m Trudy.”

“And I’m David.”

“I’m Cass,” the woman said.

The plane passed 10,000 feet, and they told us we could turn on our electronic devices. I pulled out my laptop. Trudy read a book. And Cass turned the pages in a runner’s magazine. 

3. Postscript

On the morning of the marathon, Trudy made coffee and we walked down the hill to Rock Creek Park. We found the perfect spot along the route somewhere between mile 6 and 7. We watched the wheelchairs and then the first men and then the first women go by. We watched and cheered as the stream of runners grew to a pack. We watched them run up the hill, and we watched them as they ran down the other side of the street.

We cheered and clapped next to a stone wall near the bend in the creek with a perfect view of the runners coming around a corner and under an arching span of the P Street bridge and disappearing around another bed under an arching space of the Q Street bridge.

And although we cheered and clapped from the leaders until the 4:30 pace team passed us on their way up the hill, we never did spot Jonnie or Cass, which is of course no surprise. Still, we did see many pink and chartreuse socks.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License