Thursday, May 13, 2010

Peter

Peter stood with a bouquet of flowers as we waited for the light rail. Peter wore cargo shorts, a button-up camp shirt, and clean black tennis shoes. Peter paced back and forth from the moment he got to the street corner until he took his seat on the train. When I sneezed Peter said "God bless you." Heartily, like he meant it.

Where was Peter going? Naturally that was my first question. You can't judge a book by its cover and you can't judge a guy by his light rail stop. A connecting bus can take him just about anywhere and there are a hundred possibilities on top of that. Roseville Road? Don't be so sure. Wherever he was going he was about to make some lucky lady very happy.

Or was it a girl? Maybe the roses were two days late for Mothers' Day. Maybe they were meant to lay at a grave, though this possibility didn't seem likely. His poor taste in shoes made me dismiss the possibility that the bouquet was for a man and I was startled by this uninformed and unfounded conclusion. His boyfriend might be just as embarrassed as I was by Peter's pedestrian taste, or he might not care at all which would just serve me right for stereotyping.

The pacing though, why the pacing? It wasn't weary enough for the flowers to be for a jilted wife. It wasn't self-conscious enough for the flowers to be for a secret lover. (Peter wasn't dashing enough to even have a secret lover, but there I go jumping to conclusions again.) The pacing seemed just nervous and blissful enough for a fresh new romance (hence the hearty "God bless you"), a second date maybe, or the follow-up to a promising third.

Yes, Peter was in love. At least in like. The orangish-pinkish roses were bound to be just sweet enough to make up for whatever stupid thing he'd said. The way he didn't walk on the outside of her or pull out her chair when the host finally seated them. The awkward thing he'd said that was and wasn't about her body, and did and didn't reveal what close attention he'd paid to it. Flowers seem to do the trick. And if not, the relationship was skating on thin ice already.

I had so many questions for Peter. If you wear shorts in the spring what do you do when it gets even hotter? What do you do with your hands while you're using that Bluetooth device? I wanted to tell him he'd left the price tag on the bouquet's cellophane wrapper but maybe that price tag would tell her (or him, of course) more about Peter than any number of successful dates ever could.

That he left the tag on flowers. That he wore crew socks with shorts. That he paced nervously, sat with a bouncing leg, and nearly leaped off the train at his not-so-final stop. With a bouquet of useless things he's not sure why you like. He's actually not completely sure you do. But he's trying, X amount of dollars worth, to make you believe that you are even a fraction of what he sees in you. So excuse the obvious hat hair and the pale, knobby legs. Love might be staring through wire framed glasses into your not-yet-believing eyes. God bless you.

No comments:

Post a Comment