Baffled - Feb 12 2022

 

Baffled

Feb 12 2022

It's mid-day

mid-winter

and I'm on the riverside path,

the sun bright

on fresh-fallen snow.

A guy on a unicycle wheels by

dressed lightly in shorts.

And I think back many years

to the middle school girls

who wore skirts all winter

no matter how cold,

their skinny legs exposed

except for a thin layer

of skin-tight leotard

that was starting to pill.

Which was when I started really seeing them,

noticing the girls

admiring their toughness,

wondering how such exotic creatures

could have been there all along

inhabiting the same world as me.

I wore long johns, with corduroys over top,

stiff material

that tended to bunch in the crotch when I sat.

The hipster had a man-bun

and earbuds on;

some obscure indie band

I immediately imagined.

I have to admit, I felt some envy toward him.

On account of his youth;

how the young

so cavalierly scorn the cold

or are simply oblivious.

His eccentricity, too.

More trendy than original, I concede

but still brave, and self-possessed;

bare legs and knobbly knees

going who knows where,

and such an unlikely conveyance

on a freezing winter day.

Now, the girls are also old

and I wonder how age has rendered them.

Do they still giggle easily

chatter inexplicably

ignore the cold?

Will I be passed by an old woman

on a fat wheeled bike

with a grandchild strapped to her back?

Who clearly

has it all figured out;

while I stand and watch

as she pedals by,

still baffled by life.

At first, when I started walking on the river, I tell him, I was almost the only one out there on the ice, especially at night. But soon, it seemed, a lot of people started going there. Some of them were skating, some were hitting a puck along the ice with a hockey stick, some were even cycling, and there was one guy on a unicycle, but mostly they were walking, like me.

I came across these three sentences while reading Miriam Toew's personal essay in this week's New Yorker. (The Way She Closed the Door – Feb 14 and 21, 2022.) This short passage completely incidental to the story, but struck me.

Because there is something beguilingly self-possessed about this fleeting image of the unlikely unicyclist in winter, and it immediately made me think of crossing paths with those young guys walking out of the gym in the middle of the cold season wearing just a light jacket and shorts. But then, when I started to play around with these images, the school girls who wore skirts all winter appeared to me.

Self-possessed hipsters; girls, leaving us boys behind as they raced into puberty: all people who seem to me to have it figured out when, even at my advanced age, I hardly feel I do.