Sean Bossinger’s Doings

…how does one lead to the other? When you’re as surefooted as I.

My good friend, Jen, and her family were in town for Thanksgiving with her husband’s family. I’ve known Jen for oh… 17 years. Through the years, we’ve become quite close, so our spouses indulge us, allowing us to get together every so often to reminisce and catch up. We took the opportunity to do so during my week’s vacation surrounding Thanksgiving.

One of our favorite pastimes was what we call a “walk-n-talk”. Back in our time together at the University of Florida, we would get together almost weekly and walk for hours and talk about everything: politics, friendship, families, philosophy, sex, money, partying, horses… basically anything that would come up. It was not uncommon for us to start out walking after I would end my closing shift at the Orange and Brew (an on-campus Rathskeller-esque hangout) around one in the morning, and walk the streets of the UF campus and Gainesville until near four or five in the morning - sometimes ending up at the Krispy Kreme on 13th street (north of Burrito Brothers, for those of you who may remember the area).

In the spirit of catching up on the old times, we did something similar around Coral Gables last Tuesday. We met at the Borders on US1 in Pinecrest, took the train up to University station, and walked around the University of Miami campus. From there, we walked up Ponce de Leon boulevard from the campus up to LeJeune Road, with the goal of hitting the shops at the Village of Merrick Park (a nice place to visit in the late Fall, Winter, and early Spring - otherwise it’s a hellish oven in our heat).

On the way up LeJeune road (a pretty busy thoroughfare here), I took a misstep, twisted my ankle on the uneven sidewalk, and had a split-second to make a decision: take the header into Greco avenue, potentially getting hit by traffic, or collapsing and falling onto my hand and trying to keep my head from hitting the sidewalk with the momentum from the fall. I took the latter of the two, thinking that the hand would recover better than a whole-body thrashing by 4,000 to 6,000 pounds of car or SUV.

The aftermath was quite comical: bleeding from my eyebrow, my hand all scuffed up (and bleeding a bit), my glasses crushed, my BlackBerry scratched (but otherwise functional), one knee a bit bruised from the fall, with Jen and I sitting there, her applying Neosporin ointment (brand-name only, thank you very much) to my eyebrow, me looking at my hand swelling up, and generally recovering from a successful fall. Walking in to the Neiman Marcus was like hearing a needle-scratch across the record from walking into a bar where everyone knows everyone (except for you, of course), looking like I had been mugged - especially coming in from the street entrance.

I got cleaned up in the mall restroom (after having been physically shown the facility by one of the ladies who was taking care of cleaning the floor in front of the Neiman Marcus, kind enough to stop her detail work and help me to the restroom) and we went merrily on our way, catching lunch at the Titanic Brewpub. We walked from there back down US 1 back to the Borders, where we had dessert, and talked some more about what my life goals are right now, and what she’s doing, blah blah blah (this is where I cut to the chase, leaving out stuff that’s interesting to her and I but boring for the rest of you…)

Fast forward (finally) to Tuesday, 4:30pm, and I’m sitting in the caf