Thoughts on Not Getting Mugged

In this weather—2 degrees and several weeks since the snow came—everything outside is treacherously slippy and hard. The fluffy snow of Thomas Kinkade’s dreamy imagination is long gone. No, not gone. It’s caked and clotted now. Frozen, but not ice, per se. Crystals, petrified snow.

If you haven’t shoveled yet, there’s no hope now. The trampled trail created by those who’ve traversed your untended walk is all there’s going to be for passageway until there’s some thaw.

As I navigated a stretch of this icily rutted terrain, along a parking lot that no one apparently takes any personal responsibility for, I felt like a clumsy god walking on the Rockies. More nervous, though, since even a clumsy god probably has a few tricks up his sleeve. I don’t have any tricks.

A hoodlumly-dressed fellow was crossing the street ahead of me from the Skyline Market down 10th. He saw me and changed course, promptly redirecting his steps from perpendicular to parallel with mine. That is to say, he was heading right toward me.

We would pass in the narrow stretch of trampled snow-ice that I was currently barely able to stay upright on even without having to avoid an attack on my little, yet highly precious personal self.

My chest constricted and my legs felt like water, like passing this stranger was walking off a cliff.

As we approached each other, we made eye contact flittingly the way you do when you want to look like you’re not looking at someone but you are, and they’re doing the same thing to you at the same time. We angled our bodies and made it past each other with only the slightest of contact and no tumbles fore or aft.

I felt an immediate thrill. I wasn’t so much thrilled at not being attacked, though from my current position—slaked and satiated, typing away—I’m more than a little pleased to be unharmed.

No, it was more than that, I was thrilled by the adrenaline of just barely having avoided careening over the precipice that I walked off of as I passed the seeming hoodlum. Instead I was walking on the air of an evening in which I had not been mugged.

He wouldn’t have gotten much, anyway. I don’t carry a cell phone or cash in my wallet. I didn’t have my camera that night. I’d have probably just handed over my wallet, then walked briskly home to cancel my credit cards. The next day I would’ve gone to the government center and gotten a new driver’s license.

Maybe he would have gotten angry that I was even more penniless then he was and knocked me over onto some snow crags. Maybe he would’ve beat the bejeezus out of me.

But now I’m getting ridiculous. He didn’t do anything. Perhaps he’s the nicest guy this side of Lake Street. Perhaps, to him I’m the potential mugger, knocker-downer, bejeezus-beater.

Just putting it in perspective is all.

I’m not gonna be worried about people I walk past anymore. Instead, I’m gonna do my best to make sure they’re not worried about me. Actually, I still want to be a little nervous, but not in a pessimistic, assuming-the-worst kind of way…I just like the rush.