Equinox

There’s this woman who works at the gym we go to. She’s there pretty much every morning starting at 5. Every once in a while someone else is working, but it’s usually this gal. She’s in her 60s, most likely, and looks great with it.

And she’s a talker. She loves noise.

Full disclosure: while I’m a reasonably social person under most circumstances, I’m not so much at 6 in the morning. My brain isn’t firing all neurons yet – only those needed to get me out of bed and to the gym. When I’m lifting weights, I like to concentrate on that. I don’t want to chat.

She does.

I know a lot of people do like to socialize at the gym. I see them standing around and talking for 1/2 hour or more. Me – I want to be there and gone in 1/2 hour.

I’m grumpy that way.

I’m grumpy enough that if she comes over to where I’m working out, I won’t really engage in her conversational gambits. I’ll smile, nod, give her the huh, go figure. David, being much nicer, will talk to her, which just encourages her. Then he grumbles to me later.

Today she went over to where a client was working with a personal trainer, saying something about dancing at nightclubs. I heard the client gal say in a joking voice “hey, you’re distracting my trainer – go away!”

Nicely done, I thought.

But then Chatty Sue came over to us, where David and I were working on neighboring machines.

“Today is the last day of summer!” she announced.

David said, “Oh, is it?”

“Yes! Isn’t that terrible!”

I couldn’t help myself. “It’s the autumnal equinox,” I said, “it’s a day of balance.”

“Yeah – I hate to see summer go,” she complained. And proceeded to tell us about her tomatoes which, incidentally, she’d told us about before.

I didn’t try again.

To think of today as the last day of summer is silly to me. For some of us, the weather lingers hot, for others, snow has already fallen and summer is long gone. The division of the seasons is a mark on the calendar. But the equinox is about the balance of light and dark. Exactly poised. It’s a moment of equilibrium, the pause, the imperceptible hesitation of the pendulum before it swings back the other direction.

It’s a day of possibility.