Day 90 ~ Outsider

Given that my volleyball gym is closed for the holidays, I headed to a different one. I left home early to avoid the traffic, arrived almost an hour earlier, parked and approached the lobby. Once I found out how the gym worked, I went back to the car and read my book. I returned fifteen minutes before it started and lined up. In front of me there were some twenty people. We all had in common our desire to play volleyball. Aside from that, there were two kinds of people: those whose age was half of mine, and those whose age I tripled. Nothing to worry, just a fact of life, this was a high-school and college kind of gym. I held my spot and overheard bits of the conversation between the two people in front of me. Several minutes later, I looked back and among the next twenty who arrived after me, I spotted one more player over forty. Woo-hoo! At that point, one of the two friends in front of me decided to go to the bathroom and the other asked me: "Do you come here often?" "No, it is my first time. How about you?" "Oh, I haven't been here in over a year." At that point, I confessed that I felt out of place. "I figured that's how you'd be feeling, and that's why I approached you, to make you feel better," he said. His friendliness surprised me, but granted, he was older than I expected, a biochemistry senior. We talked some more until it was time to pay and get in the gym. We put ourselves on the same team and won some games. Thank you, Ryan and Alston, for being inclusive.