Cats & Windchimes

Thursday was a day like any other day. There was a wind-aided chill in the air, cigarettes on the sidewalk and clouds in the sky. Making this day stand out was a sweatshirt worn by my coworker Barb.

Like any office in America, mine has many cubicles, lots of gossip, and a slight cloud of despair hanging overhead. Barb is a senior member of our department, having worked in the same job for almost 20 years. She loves her job and loves to talk about her job. She hops from cube to cube, from ear to ear talking about how she doesn’t have any time to get all her work done. She has a creepy way of being able to segue from talking about work to talking about her latest diet that is making her "doo-doo" green.

This particular Thursday wasn't one of those days, but it was the day I learned all I ever needed to know about my coworker Barb.

Barb was wearing a sweatshirt. The main color of the sweatshirt was light blue. Blue is a very popular color and I like blue just fine, but this blue somehow offended my senses with its blueness. It was as if a rainbow and a kitty had a baby and then that baby threw up all over her sweatshirt, it was just too light and too blue. However, the blueness was not the best part of the sweatshirt, for the front of it pictured a small kitten swatting at a wind chime. As Barb was walking within earshot of my cubical, a familiar older female coworker stopped her. You know the one, the lady with the raspy voice from 40 years of smoking, with eight oversized rings on her fingers, and a name that nobody has used to name a baby since 1940.

She stopped Barb and complimented her on her "great" sweatshirt to which Barb replied, "The second I saw it, I knew I had to have it. It has 2 of my favorite things in the world; Cats and wind chimes."

A little bit of me died that day.

Below is a reproduction of the sweatshirt, not an actual photo of the sweatshirt: