Last night, after a workout so brutal the gym owners walked
around wiping sweat off the floors while people dripped from their pushup
positions, I took a pealed orange, a fresh copy of The Hobbit (a first time
read), and a huge bundle of clothes to the local laundry mat. Being able to do
four loads of laundry in under two hours is quickly becoming my new favorite
thing. I like the quiet time to read, and if that ever gets old, I look out of
the huge frosted windows at the people walking around.
Few people who come to the laundry mat know each other, but
quick relationships are formed in sharing quarters, borrowing dryer sheets, and
like last night, working on the broken change exchange machine. I
laughed with strangers as we pooled together our money so that a designated
runner could go to another laundry mat to get us all quarters; we laughed again
when someone new walked into use our change machine and it began to miraculously
work. The four of us—an old woman in pink sweatpants, a young Asian student, a
recently immigrated Kenyan, and myself—stood around the folding tables talking
about the weather in Utah, the culture and the religion, and how hard it is to
go to school and work at the same time. Outside of the laundry mat, I would never
have told my life stories to these people, nor heard theirs. Still, for a
night, we enjoyed our unexpected conversations with the hum of the dryers as
background music.
The truth is, every day when we walk out our doors, we have
an opportunity to experience something new if we want to. They may not be the
experiences we were hoping to have—in fact, they may be nothing short of weird.
But I am starting to believe that the weird and the unexpected add the most color
to life.
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