Little Bits of Weirdness

One thing I've always been amazed by in writers is the ability to capture unexpected and unnecessary details. I remember the Woody Allen - Bette Midler movie from the early 1990s, Scenes from a Mall, where, for some reason, Woody's character ends up carrying a surfboard through the mall for most of the film's duration. A reason was of course given, but it wasn't a reason that was central to the plot. It was just ... a little bit of weirdness, for no other reason than sometimes, in life, that happens, and some guy carries a surfboard through a mall, while everyone around him tries to make sense of the story.

I have always been attracted to those bits of weirdness in life. Seeing people walking down a street carrying a tuba, say, or even that young man in the cinema bathroom I described several weeks ago. Those moments are entertaining, and valuable.

So it's ... let's say, 1980, and I'm in the passenger seat in a friend's car (although I was 13, he was 19), and we're driving somewhere on Washtenaw Avenue between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. It is, say, 3 pm in the afternoon. (All details are approximate, at this point, 42 years later).

As we're driving along, we pass a guy riding his bike on the sidewalk on the side of the road to my right, with a grassy hill sloping up immediately to his right. As we pass him, he slowly comes to a stop, for some reason ... but rather than putting out his foot to the ground, he simply ... slowly ... toppled over, sideways onto the hill, as we drive past. There was no sense that he was injured, or that the wind had pushed him over, or that he had hit anything. He just slowly coasted to a stop, then gently fell sideways onto the hill, keeping his feet on the pedals.

That story has stuck with me for these 40+ years. Indeed, to a larger extent than you might imagine, that story is the primary reason I wanted to start writing this blog. To capture those moments of oddness. I always thought, if I were writing a novel, I would want to have a little journal full of these moments, just to drop them in at the right time.

Because of course everything we see is ... unexpected. Why is that woman to my left in this coffee shop wearing a purple top? Is purple her favorite color? Did her husband mention to her once, 30 years ago, that he loved her in purple? Is it laundry day? Who knows? That's the magic of the lives of the people around us.

I hope that rider was ok, then (and remains so today).