In the morning on New Year’s Eve, I was taking the bus to Echo Park, and ran into an inevitable delay.  There had been a two-car collision on the east side of Sunset at Silver Lake Blvd, and the entire street was blocked off by police cars.

I thought car accidents were supposed to happen after people started drinking, not before.

The bus driver pulled over and turned off the engine while she called in a route for a detour.  There was apparently no great way to go about this.  We were all going to have to wait.

There was a man on the right corner of the street, in the middle of his morning run, dressed in a baseball cap and what looked like soccer gear.  Mr. Tracksuit was stretching side to side, doing some old-fashioned calisthenics while he waited for the WALK signal at the cross walk.

It was a bouncy, happy, 80’s, sore thumb kind of peppiness.

In the midst of watching his thrilling jumping jacks, I look over to the left corner and there’s a guy dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, jumping jacks in reply.  In some sort of mockery, in some sort of joy on the opposite corner, Mr. Leather Jacket was smiling, jumping, hooting and hollering.  And I looked back to the right, Mr. Tracksuit was not deterred.  When they passed in the middle of the cross walk, Mr. Tracksuit just ran along his merry way, and Mr. Leather Jacket passed off his smile.

I’d like to think that Mr. Leather Jacket wasn’t strung out on any sort of psychedelic at 8:00AM, but who’s to say.  I hope he was sharing in the morning joy that I saw on my way to point B.