And you shall know our velcocity?

and it's always difficult to look away. Even when decency and protocol prescribe diverted eyes, it draws you in.

Nursing a coffee, too hot on a too hot day, it unfolds in slow motion. It's rush hour and the people who shower before work are quickly being replaced by those who shower after work. In buildings just bustling, windows are washed and trash emptied while quietly, lives are being made or rebuilt working those anonymous, thankless jobs. iPods and Blackberries are attended to, while at the same instance, common courtesy and pedestrian rights of way are not.

The coffee is cooling now, finally, and she is unremarkable walking amongst the late-day travelers, common in her dated pantsuit, a little tight along the seams, the product of too many fancy coffee drinks and meeting doughnuts. I see her standing at a crosswalk with a coterie of office workers, most with some electronic device parasitically attached to their persons. From where I sit, looking out the coffee shop window, she is on the right, near side of the street. A bus (hint: her bus) has the green light and crosses her path from right to left and stops down the next block, across the street to our left. It will wait, but for how long is uncertain.

I sip my coffee, black, and watch the unfolding drama. She is faced with a decision now -- two crosswalks stand between her and a ride home. Two crosswalks between standing impassively amongst strangers to sitting impassively amongst strangers, eye contact actively avoided AT ALL COSTS. She makes a time-saving yet dangerous move and crosses to her left with the red hand flashing and impatient brethren in cars, red faced and bothered by the injustice of it all, waiting for her crossing when it happens, for an instant only. I don't even catch it at first.

As my coffee enters into that sweet spot of drinkability (sorry light beer, you will never enter this region), I try to figure out why it was so jarring to see what I just witnessed. Like a horror movie where a zombie has no whites in their eyes, just pupil, it is not immediately clear why the thing was so, so weird. Then it hits me. She is running. I see a preview of this as she crosses that first crosswalk. It is clear she has not ran in years, decades even. But the prospect of tardiness makes people do crazy things, unthinkable in normal context.

The seconds tick off, the bus still idling as it unloads/loads its stores and looks, with flashing lights and a buzz of activity on and around it, somehow impatient, as if it were in an unnatural state when static. The woman, red in the face from unexpected and unaccustomed exertion, is bouncing maniacally on the balls of her feet, muttering under her breath. Because of a bar on the window that perfectly obstructs her head when standing still, she perfectly channels Whack-a-Mole when bobbing, her dated bouffant now perfect for this clever allusion.

The light turns green and she lurches forward, into a gait that is still deciding whether it should be a run, or just a sorry attempt at one. The seconds seem like minutes, etc, etc, etc. as she hoofs it across the street and onto the sidewalk. While it looks unnatural, harried, at first, she begins to ease into a more manageable jog as she dodges commuters on the sidewalk, oblivious to the event unfolding before their eyes. The bus driver, being a hybrid of the office workers and workers in the office by law of proximity to their commute, senses the woman flapping along the sidewalk and graciously waits for her, even though there is a green light that turns red just as she reaches the steps.

For kids, running is the only natural thing to do. Run to school (or, more often, from school). Run, against mother's wishes, in the house. Run outside. Run in the winter. Run in the summer. Run all the time. Kids, not Kenyans (but of course, Kenyan kids), are the best runners in the world. Keeping appearances or dignity in tact is not high on the list of priorities for a young person with a destination and only distance and that annoying concept of time between them. So they run. But for the rest of us, we joggers decked out in fashionable, technical garb, who run for 30 minutes (45 on Tuesdays and Thursdays) at a time, we office dwellers who spend prime kid-running time stuck sitting indoors, we never think to have less than one foot on the ground as we enter into locomotion. Must preserve professionalism and dignity AT ALL COSTS.

The woman's hair is now a mess and her once tidy (if snug) pantsuit is now unbuttoned and wrinkled. But as she makes her way toward the back of the bus and takes a seat by the window on my side, I see she is laughing, remembering how it feels to run like a kid.