Why would anyone go to the gym smelling as if she soaked herself in a bath of cheap perfume prior to hitting the road is beyond me.
I don’t particularly care whether I reek of God-given body odors when I’m at the gym. There are times when I don’t even wash last night’s sleep off my face. I figure that I’ll sweat bullets and give off a smell that would scare a skunk as I burn off the fat from sweating like a pig anyway. So why bother making myself presentable at the gym, right?
Well, one day, I was on an elliptical next to a woman who I had already noticed months ago to be strikingly tall and huge – an Amazon of a woman who could easily sack me with her pinkie and, worse, asphyxiate me with her eau-de-sumptin’. She had always been an olfactory challenge ever since I met her and she didn’t fail today.
As I was increasing speed on my elliptical, I slowly turned my face slightly away from her so I could breathe in some unadulterated air. It felt kinda weird huffing and puffing with a face slightly askance and since I didn’t want my neck to freeze in that twisted position, I turned it forward. Well, as I did so, I peripherally caught her giving me a big smile to which I sheepishly returned in kind.
After a brief moment of being taken aback by her friendliness, I faced her and said, “You know, it is rare to encounter anyone here to be friendly”. She responded with a smile, “I am different, since I am a nice person type.” Pleased with her honesty, I replied by saying that life was short and that indeed we should continue to be nice to each other. We grunted in approval. As we retreated to do our own “thing”, she on her iPad and I on my iPhone trying to find the damn bears on Candy Crush.
With her perfume still smarting my Filipino nose, I thought to myself, “Was I too quick to judge/dismiss her based on smell alone? Had she not flashed me a smile, I would have missed the chance of knowing her as a nice person. One would think that now being 71 years old that I had become less judgmental. But no, I was far from it this instance. Luckily that initial impression was short-lived since her winsome smile won me over. Who knows. she and I might end up as BFF. Perhaps then I can tell her to leave her eau-de-sumptin’ smell at home.
You know, I have to sometimes remind myself that I “shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”.
