Saturday, 07 November 2009

• The Jogger

  Another segment of "Bus Stop Sketches" that I got back from my professor a couple days ago...

  
  

  It wasn’t supposed to rain today.  The forecast said partially cloudy skies and only a 30% chance of rain, which wasn’t enough to bring on this downpour.  Really?  Of all days, it had to rain today.  It was just his luck.

              The jogger was soaked.  If you rubbed him up against a huge bar of soap, he could probably wash your dishes with his body instead of using a sponge.  His jogging suit held enough water that he could probably wash a couple hundred dishes before he needed to go out in the rain again.  And all he’d have to do then would be walk to the corner and back and he’d be just as soaked, ready for another hundred dishes.

              It had to be today.  Start on a Monday, he told himself.  Monday would be the start of his new lifestyle.  His wife was skeptical.  Waking up at four in the morning and going out jogging did not sound like something he would do just to kick off a new lifestyle, and she would personally like to see if he could pull it off.  So she was at home.

              He had been doing well, keeping up his own pace, wheezing a little, but surviving.  He was three miles away from home when the skies decided to let loose.  The droplets divebombed straight down, tablespoon sized globs of misery for the jogger.  And the puddles appeared with the rain, soggy sinkholes of disaster, soaking his sneakers through to the socks.  And if he broke a sweat, he couldn’t tell since his clothes stuck to his skin from the dripping wet.

              Even now, as he calmly surrendered to the elements, the jogger stood in the rain.  There was something bigger out there.  Something that didn’t want him to go out jogging today.  Was it God?  The jogger doubted that God really cared about his jogging when He had more important things to deal with, like monsoons or hurricanes or some other natural disaster.  Then again, the 30% chance of rain changing into an all out storm might have more significance to it than the idiocy of the weather man.

              Maybe this was the beginning of a conversion from being an indifferent Catholic to true, authentic Catholicism.  Maybe he would join the priesthood, or donate all his savings to a Jesuit college preparatory high school.  Or maybe he would start going to mass every Sunday, send his kids to CCD, take Communion, go to Confession.  Maybe he would sell all his old records at a church rummage sale to benefit children with AIDS in Africa, or learn how to bake so he could sell cookies and cakes at a bake sale.

              Who was he kidding?  Realizing God’s power because it rained while he went out jogging?  Talk about mundane, God undermining a man’s attempt at a change in lifestyle.  It was more likely that the weather man was an idiot.

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