Upon rising my first morning in the new (to me) apartment I became aware of something happening below my window. I could only see a bit through a gap in the lush green of the treetops. The first figure I saw was walking very slowly with his head down. I quickly noticed another, and after a brief gap, another. There was a steady stream of these strange people wearing some kind of uniforms. "They seem to be looking down at their phones", was my first thought, but why were they all walking single file and spaced a bit apart from each other?
The next thing I noticed was that they all had their hands behind their backs. Startled, I surmised they must be in handcuffs. That would explain the slow movements and bent posture. They were dejected prisoners having their 30 mins of fresh air! So much for the cellphone theory, but this development was alarming! "I'm living next to a prison!" I began to imagine escaped convicts scaling the walls and climbing in my bedroom window during the night. I rushed to locate my glasses and have a better look.
Oh dear, they are teenagers! Now the boys have passed and the current ones seem to be girls! Then one girl suddenly broke from the stance, took her hands out from behind her back and ran a few paces before quickly resuming the required posture, and going back to the slow plodding gait. "She is trying to catch up when the teacher looks away for a minute." After many more young girls passed by, there was one who twirled around with her braids flying and took a few fancy dance steps while walking backwards only to quickly resume the usual pose. "The class clown."
"So I live next to a school. And the kids are being taught for some reason to walk carefully putting heel to toe which requires them to look down and to move slowly. What a very silly goose I am."
