What struck me right off was the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth while he spoke, like something from an old movie. He had that grizzled, just-got-up-from-a-bender look, and was having this animated conversation on his rather large cellphone. I see him every day, a portly guy in his 40's, walking his two dogs, leaning back into it with the new one that is on a leash. The other dog is some kind of sheepherder dog and always comes up to me in a friendly way to see if my dogs have left him some kind of dog-DNA secret message.
The two of us cross paths every day, me doing my morning jog, and him, I think, walking to 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes, or exercising the dogs. I begin to wonder if there is really somebody on the other end of that cellphone call, I mean, it's 6:30 in the morning and the guy is quite a character from what I can see.
There is a lot of comfort in seeing the same things every day and running the same place, but yesterday something happened. There is another jogger I see every day going in the opposite direction and yesterday I saw him turn off on a side street. You see, I run down the main highway, because I measured the distance in my car, and knew how far I could go in an hour, but suddenly it ocurred to me that I don't have to run the same place every day, just go for 30 minutes and then turn around.
Today I went down that side street and a new world opened up to me. Instead of a busy road full of cars, there were beautiful homes and little lakes and new people with their dogs. It was always there, why did it take me so long to find it?
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