There’s no wind and the air is pre-rain heavy, pre-rain cool. The baker at Fantastico is on a break and is sitting at a table chatting to a guy who works at a Brewery. Baker’s jeans are folded once at the cuff. Black t-shirt. He’s on the left flank of the entrance if you’re approaching the café and I’m on the right flank, and our chairs are angled so that we’re in each other’s line of sight. Brewery is talking about their new marketing gimmick, sealing beer in mason jars and selling them for 60 cents per, but the baker, you can tell, has stopped listening because here comes a redhead his age. His hair is buzzed on the sides, the baker’s, and the length on top is parted, combed and slicked left. He has a British accent. Neither of the boys are smoking. It’s a non-smoking patio. The redhead is approaching from behind him and is separated from them by a stone retaining wall built with a wide berth, and she swings with it, all the way around so that now she is walking towards the entrance and the Baker is on her left. She looks quickly to her right and then angles her shoulders slightly left, which is not going to make it easy to open the door since the door itself pulls open left, so she is either going to have to perform some deft footwork, having now rendered ineffective the same-side-lever-principle, i.e. weight on the left leg if you’re pulling with your left arm, or she is going to awkwardly collapse into her right arm if she tries opening the door that way. The door isn’t light. Either way it was a mistake to angle her shoulders left if she wants to enter the café, if that’s her objective, but it’s clear she did it to keep her eye on the baker because since seeing him she has been unable to look away, all the way in, so that she nearly misses the door handle when she reaches for it. The baker himself, at this point, is still a non-participant in the conversation with Brewery and is staring back. Which is when she surprises all of us by pulling with her right arm, weight on her right foot, then spinning 360 degrees counterclockwise and entering the café with her left foot first, her red hair still gracefully following the momentum of her body, lifted off her shoulders for another couple of seconds and somehow picking up a bit of preternatural light on this cloudy morning. Brewery asks him if he’s listening.
“Sorry”, Baker says, letting out a puff of air. “I just felt really good about myself for a moment.”
I’m watching all of this with my head on the table, a head I seem unable to lift, which is probably from yesterday’s 35km day. The runs are feeling good.