Get Low

I can't tell you the day when it happened, how it came to happen, or why it happened but at some point in my life I stopped looking down to see where I was going. For the most part looking up and ahead never failed. Yes, there were a couple of times when I would trip up here and there, but looking people square in the eye as you pass and scoping out the area where you were headed usually meant I was confident in my direction, in myself, and I would get there without incident.

A couple of weeks ago I finally met Mijo after knowing him from the internet for 13 years. 13!!! That's insane. I've met other people much faster but then again they've come and gone. (I wonder what they're up to now?) But Mijo's always been there and now I've finally met him. It still boggles my mind thinking about it, actually. Anyway, I digress, he can be a whole other post entirely.

So I had a whole whopping 4 hours or so to hang with Mijo and his lovely girlfriend and she re-focused my eyes to the ground...not so I would look at the ground and that's it but just to remember to take in everything in my surroundings. Like she said, it was amazing what I could miss if I didn't peer down once in a while. I could have stepped on a stinkbug - unfortunate for the stinkbug and VERY inconvenient for me. I would have missed the little lizards darting in and out of their hidey-holes. I might have stepped on and really pissed off a rattlesnake *shudders* (No, I didn't encounter a rattlesnake but there were signs posted to let me know I was on rattlesnake turf. Gah!) It was crazy. And it would have been impossible for me to navigate the tide pool - my first ever natural tide pool experience! - without looking down. I would have surely bailed on a rock or something.

You would think I would have already learned that lesson on my trip to New York with Civic (who doesn't actually drive a Civic anymore, but oh well). I was always looking up and about I was so in love with all the skyscrapers and, oh look, Times Square, and oooh, Madison Square Garden. He was constantly saving me from tripping up or lunging forward off the sidewalks and becoming Big Apple roadkill.