sometimes a gut is only a gut

i been 'training,' see, for a 13 mile run, coming up saturday morning. that means i've been running a lot. so much that some of my toes are black and blue. but that's okay. they don't hurt, they just look unpristine. i feel in good shape, clothes are fitting differently, and such. and then, twice this week, ladies on the subway have offered me seats. because, you see, they think i am pregnant. i would not at all object to it if it were so. but it is not currently so. and today i was a little miffed when a woman offered and i said rather curtly,

'no, no i don't want your seat. i don't want it.'

and then i rued (an anagram for rude—hello, serendipity, my old friend!) my discourteousness because she didn't know her question was going to irk me. she was trying to be decent, a rarity, really on the subway. so a few minutes later i tapped her on the shoulder to express my regret at having been curt. my world is more better when i am not angry.

the other day in the cooperative supermarket where i toil once a month, the couple whose food i was scanning was speaking hebrew and another shopper tried to get by, gently bumped into the fellow, and said, 'sorry.' and then the israeli said to his friend, in hebrew, 'it's so weird here how everyone says sorry if they hit you like that. at home nobody would say it, you'd just hit and brush past and no big thing.' different societies, i said in english (was that wrong to intrude? my co-op is like that and it can be a decided nuisance; they didn't mind a lick).

'different.'

my grandmother is deaf since young childhood and never learned well to read or write, having grown up in an era when deaf education was really all about making the deaf blend in and talk like me and you, assuming you are a hearing reader (if there are any at all). i heard stories that her teachers made the children wear mittens on their hands and also slap them with rulers when caught signing. these might be apocryphal. but i do know the sign for different (and jewish, incidentally and how to spell my actual name, not slushy, and old—but that might be the same sign as jewish) and that is often her comment on things, 'different' and the sign is that the two index fingers extend next to each other and then move away. and you simultaenously say, 'different.' that's how we grandchildren see it and sometimes repeat it and, i suppose, gently mock it.