Everybody Has a Story

Have you ever wondered how you got where you are? Or, have you ever looked around you and wondered how the people around you got to where they are? Maybe because I come from a family of geographers, I'm hyper aware of my surroundings, and I've always had a keen interest in other people's stories. When I was a kid, we used to go on a lot of road trips, and I was always content to stare out the car window, watch the world go by, and make up stories about the people living in the houses we passed. I'd ask myself what it's like to live in a run-down farmhouse just a hundred feet off the interstate that thousands and thousands of cars whiz by per day. How did you get there? Have you lived there your whole life? And if so, how did your grandparents or your great grandparents get there? I used to love watching Steve Hartman's Everybody Has a Story on the CBS news, where he threw a dart at a map of the U.S., then traveled to the place where the dart landed, then randomly chose a person from the phone book (remember those?), then ran a story on that person. The stories were always interesting, and that's the whole point. Everybody Has a Story. (I just Googled this so I could be certain I wasn't making this up; for an example, see: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/everybody-has-a-story-flashbacks/).

I had my own Steve Hartman moment today.

I've been slowly acquiring the things that I'll need for my upcoming surgeries through a combination of Amazon, thrift stores, Craigslist, and begging, borrowing, and stealing. Okay, not really stealing. I had actually forgotten about Craigslist until a couple of weeks ago. When my kids were younger, I went through a phase where I bought pretty much everything off of Craigslist. Then when they got older, I sold all of said stuff on Craigslist, and I really haven't done much Craigslisting lately. But I had forgotten the awesomeness of Craigslist - that is, when you have the time to actually shop around and pick out the good deals from the bad deals ($80 for a used wheelchair when you can buy a new one for $65?!) and the flakes and the creepers from the normal people who just want to unload some junk and make a few bucks in the process.

One of the things I've been looking for is a stationary bike. Dr. Terminator said I'd need to ride a stationary bike between my arthroscopy and PAO, to get the fluid out of my hip joint. I don't have a stationary bike, and I don't belong to a gym, and I don't want to join one just for a week of stationary biking. I inquired on Facebook about borrowing one from a local friend, and apparently none of my friends have one, either - or maybe they do, and they just don't want to lend it to me. LOL. So I went onto Craigslist, where I found a bunch of fancy bikes for, like, $200+. I mean, maybe that's a good deal - I have no idea how much a stationary bike costs, but I do know that I do not want to pay hundreds of dollars for one. All I need is for my legs to be able to go round and round; I mean, hell, if worst comes to worst, I could just lie on my back and pretend bike. I remember doing a gig for an elementary school talent show where my friend and I stood on our heads and bicycled upside down to the tune of It's a Small World After All.

Among the ads for fancy pants bikes, I found one for $25 that was just perfect. $25! I immediately sent an e-mail, and to my surprise, I immediately heard back (rare in my experience). The bike was still available, I just needed to call the woman to get her address and set up a time to pick it up. I didn't respond right away because I hate calling people; for some weird reason, it has always stressed me out. Calling strangers is even worse. So I put it off. When I checked my e-mail a few hours later, bike woman had sent me an e-mail asking me if I still wanted the bike. She said she had someone else who wanted it, but you seemed like you really wanted [it] so I am giving you first chance at it. That was pretty sweet of her. I mean, really. In my Craigslist experience, I usually just try to dump the item off to the first person who can come by. And if you're looking for a stationary bike, you can't beat $25. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can sell it for quite a bit more once I'm done with it, at which point I'll probably feel a little bad. But the point is that I was pretty sure she was going to have a lot of people interested in the bike before long. So I replied to her e-mail promptly, and just in case she needed another reason to save the bike for me, I wrote that I was getting ready to have hip surgery, and I needed an inexpensive bike for my rehab. (Advice: play the woe is me card when you need to.) She replied, It will be a perfect bike for that. I used it to rehab from heart surgery. Heart surgery. So my first thought was, well, at least I'll be able to outrun her if she's a creeper. LOL. My second thought was more paranoid: maybe this is how she lures people into her house. She probably didn't even have heart surgery. She's probably a creepy old man trying to get an aspiring fitness guru into his house so he can tie her up and keep her in the basement. I mean, that's the problem with Craigslist, there's that you never know factor. And $25 for a bike seemed too good to be true.

I called her today and was relieved that she sounded like a normal person. And I was pretty sure I heard a kid in the background, which made me feel better. I feel like people who do shady things don't usually do them with kids around. But then, when she went to give me her address, she started to say, 'It's one... wait...' then she acted funny, like she couldn't remember it - her own address. Then she paused, as if she were asking someone what her address was, and eventually said, 'It's 3672 ABC Street.' That made me a little nervous. Woman lures unsuspecting woman into creepy man's house to be held as a sex slave. Then she added quickly, almost apologetically, 'Lot 197.' Ah, a trailer park. At least trailers don't have basements. And in a trailer park, the other trailers are very close by, so it seems like an unlikely place where you could hold people against their will. I felt pretty confident that my $25 stationary bike was legit.

Bike woman's house was in a part of town I'm not familiar with, so it took me longer to get there and find the park than I had planned on. Within the park, the homes did not seem to be arranged in a logical manner, so I drove around the park past at least 200 trailers before finding hers. I was actually just about to give up and call her, not so much because I didn't think I'd eventually find her place, but just so she would know I wasn't flaking out on her (because I HATE it when flaky Craigslist people flake out on me!), but it turns out I didn't have cell reception. When I did find her place, it was obvious, because there was a stationary bike sitting out in the front yard. Sweet relief. Ha.

I went up and knocked on the door, and other than feeling certain I wasn't going to be attacked and taken hostage, I'm not sure what I was expecting. As awful as it is, we make assumptions about people based on (very, very, very) limited information, and what I knew was that I was buying a bike from a woman who had had heart surgery who lives in trailer park and didn't seem to know her own address. So I was surprised when a totally normal looking youngish woman (probably a little younger than I am) answered the door. She had on a v-neck t-shirt that revealed a scar all the way up to her trachea. There was a boy next to her, probably around my daughter's age. The surprise was obviously mutual, although at first, bike woman just focused on explaining all the features of the bike to me. But eventually, she said somewhat awkwardly, 'Hip surgery... I was expecting someone... much older.' LOL. I gave her a nervous little smile and said, 'Heart surgery... I was also expecting someone much older' (and fatter, I thought to myself, to be completely honest). She smiled knowingly, with that look of yes, I get that a lot, and replied, 'I was born that way' (whatever 'that' is). I smiled and replied, 'I was born that way, too.' And in the few seconds that followed, we exchanged looks that were something along the lines of, Ah, yes, you must get this a lot. You don't look like someone who's had heart/hip surgery. Bike woman then expressed surprise that I was alone, and went back into the house to get her husband to come help me move the bike into my van. It turns out I could do it by myself just fine, but I guess someone who is getting ready to have hip surgery shouldn't be fit enough to lift a bike up into her van. ;-) Eventually, she wished me luck with my surgeries, and I drove off.

I'm not really sure why this had such a profound effect on me, but I think it gets back to what I wrote about in the beginning, that Everybody Has a Story. In the few exchanges I had with bike woman, I felt some sort of instant bond, because neither one of us was what the other was expecting, and yet we totally understood. I know I don't look like someone who has severe hip problems. And I know that bike woman knows she doesn't look like someone who has had heart surgery. Just a few words and a few facial expressions between us and I knew this, and she knew this. Then the Steve Hartman in me started to wonder...

How did you get here?
How did you come to live in the god-forsaken trailer park? 
Did you just move here? 
Is that why you didn't know your own address?
Was it because of your heart surgery?

We all have stories. Most of them are full of the unexpected. I want to know other people's stories. But I can't, because I am not Steve Hartman, and asking things would make me the creeper I hope to avoid. So instead, I can only wonder, and make up my own stories, and wonder if other people make up stories about me. Maybe bike woman did. Maybe that's why she wanted me to have the bike.

Regardless, thank you, bike woman, for saving the bike for me. I hope your heart is okay, in every way possible. XOXO.