As I’m still easily impressed, even at my ripe old age. I’m constantly finding “characters” in my daily interactions, and there are an awful lot of characters here in Colorado.

For example, the tall, thin, rustically-bearded 30-something man I see at the gas station almost every morning when I’m getting my daily Diet Coke:  he drives an older Jeep Cherokee, lifted, with more mud than paint, and no front doors.  I’m wondering how long it took to get used to driving like that.  I’m sure that it’s a cooler-than-most drive in the summer.  This morning I noticed he’d put the doors back on his truck.  He still has his rustic beard, and has traded his cargo shorts and t-shirts for jeans and long-sleeved t-shirts over his boots.

Then there’s the neighbor on the other side of the cul-de-sac.  He’s the dad of the little girl Tater plays with a lot.  Sunday, as I came out of the house in a fog of hunger on my way to the grocery store for bisquick (Sunday means waffles in this house!), he waved at me.  I waved back,  Then I realized how big that man is.  He was getting into his older Suburban, and his shoulders came to the top of the truck.  Good Lord.  I’ve probably seen him a dozen times or more since we’ve lived here.  Why didn’t I notice that?  Their kids have unusual names, despite the fact that they appear to be Hispanic (although the kids do not speak Spanish): Scarlett, Sierra, Thorn, and Chasper.

My boss is a complete character.  She has big, meaty hands, and types on her keyboard like she just learned how to do it last week.  That poor keyboard gets hammered! And I don’t know how her mouse survives more than a week of that pounding index finger she hovers at full extension above it.  It makes me laugh.  She is fervant, zealous, and totally dedicated to what she does.  And she doesn’t like it when people touch the monitors with their fingers.  But keyboard be damned!   She has been awesome to work for, and I couldn’t ask for anything better.

And when I was at the salon getting my nails done a few weeks ago, one of their techs came in, his two little boys in tow.  I did a double-take and tried not to stare.  The guy looked just like Vin Diesel.  Yes, with tattoos and everything.  He gathered his supplies and sat down on one of those tiny little pedicure stools and started working on some lady’s toes.  Unfortunately, mine had already been done and I did not get the Vin Diesel treatment.  Hey, I think Vin did great in The Pacifier taking care of kids…why couldn’t he be a nail tech too?

And I like seeing the middle-aged Hispanic men in the grocery store.  Or anywhere else.  They may drive the rattiest, beat up old car ever (either a Chevy, Toyota, or Nissan), but when they are going to the store, they dress like gentlemen.  They wear long-sleeved dress shirts, sometimes plaid, sometimes western-style, buttoned down, with a bolo tie at the neck, a white t-shirt underneath.  They have that shirt tucked into crisp black jeans or dress pants, over cowboy boots polished but not to a shine.  They have black belts with big silver belt buckles, and they wear a sharp, clean straw cowboy hat.  Their hair is oiled and slicked back away from their dark, leathery faces, and when they smile, there’s a gold tooth to show.  If they have a mustache, it’s neatly trimmed, and there’s never a beard.  These men don’t go anywhere without dressing appropriately, neatly, cleanly.  By contrast, their younger brethren wear droopy clothes and oversized t-shirts, their hair buzzed to their scalps.

Characters.  They are everywhere.

There is such an interesting mix of tattoos, colorful clothes, oddly-colored hair, interesting shoes, Jeeps/Toyota Trucks/Subarus that there is always something for me to look at.  And enjoy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.