Nobody Likes To See An Old Lady Hustle

It’s true you know, but there you are, on the bus and you see her, just having glanced up from Harper’s or the New Yorker or whatever else you’re pretending to read while you trade glances with gorgeous ugly people. She’s old like your grandmother and her legs are defying the established science of elderly running. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be that old so you watch her, running for a bus stop that’s impossibly far ahead of her and you know the cold air stings her lungs. Christ, it stings yours and you’re only thirty. You feel an overwhelming sadness as you try to imagine what it feels like to push every living cell in your body harder tha- hey, what the hell are those kids doing?

There are these two kids standing at the corner of an intersection and from a distance, it looks like they’re punching the air. They’re facing each other on different sides of the same corner and punching the air in front of them robotically, in evenly spaced turns. Punch, one two three, punch one two three, punch. In traffic, you’re moving slowly towards them, confusion. It makes no sense. This is a nice neighborhood with clean sidewalks and unlocked doors. Children don’t stand on street corners and punch at nothing.

One block away and for the first time, you see a faded yellow sphere hover in the air between their raised fists. Punch, one two three, punch. Tetherball. They’re punching a tetherball that’s tied to a stop sign and you push your face and palms against the cold bus window to watch them float by. One of them notices you. He grabs the tetherball in mid-flight, smiles, and gives you the finger.

You haven’t ever really felt so powerless, but isn’t that just like love?

It's tetherball on a stop sign, played by children, slamming invincible fists into the soft, leather flesh of that ball. My god how it soars and wraps its tether around the pole, like the stripes that climb the lighthouse where you stood with her to launch balsa-wood gliders into some Pacific inlet. On hers, she had written “From Russia, With Love,” and on yours you’d written, “I wish I’d learned to play piano.” Later, on the beach below the lighthouse, you’d find her glider lodged between driftwood and rusted crab steel, and you’d wonder if yours ever did come down. It flew from the top of the lighthouse directly into the sun, while you pumped your fist and chanted, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” for the benefit of dispassionate seagulls and the one person with timing so perfect, she can slam her fist into the tetherball to spin it on an angle impossible for you to reach.