I thought it was an isolated incident.
Then over the weekend another altercation involving my spouse made this one seem mild, if not downright pleasant.
Dave and I were running around our local lake on Friday night, and as usual, we moved from the walking path to the bike path to avoid two ridiculous and unnecessary hills along the way. On the first hill, a man and woman on bikes passed us, vocalized the requisite "on your left," and breezed by without a problem. On the second hill, at the exact opposite side of the lake, the same couple came by again. This time "on your left" was followed by, "Come on, guys, it's a bike path."
Fair enough, I thought. It is a bike path. But when you add these two bikers to the total number of bikers we see on Lake Phalen each year, the number reaches approximately 12. Maybe.
Dave didn't keep his thoughts to himself. "If you don't like it, buddy, you can ride on the street," he said.
And the man stopped.
I won't go into all of the details, but watching from a fair distance after my retreat to the walking path, I could see that words were being exchanged at a rather close range. And it didn't look pretty.
I get a little annoyed when things like this happen, and I yelled to them both that there was no point in ruining a perfectly good afternoon to fight over this. The man's wife seemed to agree with me from her fair distance farther up the path.
Dave, finally, walked away from the angry biker, but not far enough before the man decided to TRIP him. Let me say that again. The man tried to TRIP him. Luckily, Dave kept his balance.
Something about that TRIP triggered something in my peace-loving soul, and I calmly walked over to the man and explained: "You know, it's one thing to tell us to get off the bike path. Fine. We'll move over. But when you decide to get physical, it just makes you an asshole."
And his come back was really quite good: "Can you read?"
Oh lord. I didn't realize it until just then, but all of a sudden we were in one of those arguments where all of the logic in the world was not going to make a bit of difference. So I walked away and said nothing.
The next moments are kind of a blur, but as the man followed me, I realized that his wife was still telling him to stop and was standing just a few feet away now. It took me until this moment to look at her. And another moment to realize that I knew her. And another to realize that this was going to be the most embarrassing moment of my life.
Because she is an assistant professor in my department. Where I am a student. And she is a professor. In my department. Where she is a professor.
I'm actively trying to block this out from here on, but I do know I mumbled several rounds of "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."
To her credit, she ended the entire situation by saying boldly and loudly to her husband, "Stop now. This is my colleague." Which was nice. Because she's a professor. And I'm a student.
We exchanged looks and they rode off.
But it wasn't over. Partly because I was absolutely fuming at Dave for making his initial comment and at myself for bringing profanity* into the debacle. And partly because they decided to wait for us a half mile down the path.
The good news is that they had decided to stop in order to apologize. The bad news is that I just wanted to crawl in a hole over the whole thing and now I had to prolong the event in one of those terribly, terribly awkward small-talk situations after having to exchange apologies. I mean, really. The whole conversation ended in my getting advice about my job search in the fall. It was helpful, but come on, how awkward is that?
There's no moral to the story here. It's just really embarrassing. And what's worse, I expect to see these two at every turn now. I've been living in fear to the extent that I've been running up those f*!%ing ridiculous hills.
*Although, and I've gone over this in my mind several times, I didn't actually call the man an asshole. I merely suggested that he could be perceived as one in this situation.
