Everyone's Offended

I'd left my glasses in the car. I'd been swimming, and had forgotten a case for them, so I hadn't brought them inside. I was done swimming, walking down the little hallway that would dump me back outside, to my car and glasses, when I saw a man walking toward me. Despite my lack of eyewear, I could see the large print of his shirt. It proudly proclaimed his support for for Lauren Boebert. I squinted, trying to make out what the smaller print under Boebert's name said, when a short, heavyset woman passed the man in the Boebert shirt, her face set in a heavy scowl.

The woman, not at all concerned about forcing the man more toward the center of the hallway, walked straight to my husband. My husband wore a pink shirt that said Mind Your Own Uterus.

She stopped in front of my husband. This caused the Boebert man to stop, me to stop, my husband to stop, and just as we all stopped, two sweaty Crossfitters, dressed in expensive athletic wear and loudly talking about WODs, stepped out a door and directly into our paths. They also stopped, the door stuck open as there was no room for it to shut.

The woman, though, she was unmoved.

"Nice shirt," she said, loudly.

Then she held up her fist for a fist bump and my husband, initially stunned, finally let out a bark of a laugh and completed the fist bump.

Then she walked way, an icebreaker on a frozen sea, and my husband, me, the Boebert man, and the Crossfitters, still rooted to our spots in the middle of the hallway, stared at each other. Everyone was a bit mortified, but some of us more offended than others. When we were finally able to step around each other, the woman was long gone, and only the memory of a Mind Your Own Uterus shirt and Lauren Boebert shirt nearly colliding in a sweaty, gym hallway remained.