10.31.01
Yogi Lea requests that we walk to yoga instead of driving because it allows us the chance to center ourselves before we get all bendy.
Being that I only work like 8 blocks from the place in which we get all bendy, I am more than happy to comply. At least, I am happy for now. I may revise that opinion when it gets all blustery and cold.
Frequently, I find myself meandering across campus, and then idly staring into the dingy depths of the Iowa River as I cross the Burlington Street Bridge on my way to yoga. Random weirdness rambles through my head as I stroll, like the times when I wonder if the reason there aren't more leaves floating on the surface is because the nasty chemicals that flow into the river as farmland run-off don't dissolve them on contact.
Or like today, where I was trying to decide if the orange floaty spheroid over by the edge of the river on the side away from me was a basketball or a pumpkin. Until I got close enough to actually determine it was vegetable and not mineral, or at least a round piece of inflatable plastic, I was leaning more towards a basketball. Somehow, it made more sense for a basketball to be floating merrily down the Iowa River than a pumpkin.
I began to wonder exactly why the pumpkin was in the river. Most likely some hooligan threw it in the river, although my active imagination was picturing something more along the lines of the Gingerbread Man that ran away.
"I'll run and run as fast as I can! You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man."
Like that, only pumpkinier.
Mr. Pumpkin was on his way to market in the back of a flatbed pickup truck, when he saw the river and made a break for it, throwing himself over the side, bobbing and floating his way down the river, taking in the sights.
I just didn't have the heart to picture him reaching the other side of the bridge and the crushing dam that lurks therein.
