Feeling Blue?

Try a hula hoop!

I am hula hooping on the median of Granby street, next to the lady that started hula hooping on the median of Granby street. I am smiling and laughing. She looks me in the eye, smiles and says "Fun isn't it?" "Yes!"

"I don't even know your name," I say to her. "I make food not stick, I'm Pam, feel my abs." I feel her abs, they are hard as a watermelon with flesh. "Feel my shoulder, it has pins in it," she tells me as she grabs my hand, places it on her shoulder and makes her shoulder pop in and out. "This is as far as my arms go behind my back," she demonstrates, her hands don't touch behind her back, no way for handcuffs to be applied. "They forced them on me," she continues to tell me how she was forcefully arrested a few weeks ago.

Arrested and tazed, the happy hula hoop lady on Granby street. Doesn't make sense to me. Pam was in a car accident 30 years ago on prom night. She suffered brain damage. The doctors said she would never walk or talk again. She is walking. She is talking. Most days she is hula hooping on the median of Granby street.

People driving by are honking and waving. I know all the days I have driven past Pam, I have smiled, sometimes waved. This time I drove by feeling blue and saw lots of hula hoopers, I smiled. I made a u turn, parked, grabbed my favorite red camera and started snapping pictures. That is when Fame a young man from Balitmore said "Come on just grab a hoop!" So I grabbed a hoop. Fame and I laughed as it took me a few trys to remember how to hula hoop. "This is my first day hula hooping," Fame laughed some more.

Fame told me that he and his friend Noel drove all the way from Baltimore to be here. They heard Pam's story and decided to come join the rebel Granby street hula hooper. We didn't talk much after that, we just laughed and hooped. The sun was shining a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Hula hooping on the median of Granby street. Happiness.