Leslie and I now work a block from each other, which is really great, really. Carpooling is good for the environment, right? The couple that commutes together transmutes together, or cahoots together, or something like that. So it’s all good until it’s not all so good. Carpooling is another negotiation in a good and complicated marriage. And what true marriage isn’t complicated? Occasionally she needs the car to get to other locations in Seattle Colleges’ vast network of campuses and satellites. And that’s cool. I always assure her that I’ll get home okay if she can’t pick me up. I’ll ask a friend. Or finally learn to take public transportation. Or call a cab. But I never do. Instead, I hill bomb home. And it is a wild ride, my friends.

My chair commute is a straight shot from Cap Hill to Pioneer Square. A zoom down Pike and a sharp left on 1st Avenue. Takes me about 30 minutes if I make all the lights. No big deal. Some crappy curb cuts and bumpy side walks. But nothing I can’t handle. Except when I forget my gloves, and I often neglect to retrieve them from the back of the car.

So, for each and every hill bomb, I do what any red-blooded American male would do in the same situation: I purchase oven mitts, the cheapest I can find at the closest place, Walgreens on Broadway and Pike. They do the trick. No extra wear and tear on my hands. No extravagant expense. No need to tell Leslie. Except that she found my stash. Of course she did. She sniffs out any and all mysteries. Try throwing her a surprise party. It’s very, very difficult.

So I’m throwing together dinner after my latest whizz home, my current speciality of spicy pepper sauce with baked eggs and chorizo on the side, when she asks about the new collection of ugly oven mitts with the suspicious tire mark across the palm. Busted. I fess up. And yet I’m proud of my ingenuity, my self-sufficiency, my devil-may-care attitude about my general personage. So I offer up my adventure, and we both have a good chortle. She can’t shake the image of oven-mitted me in downtown Seattle passing commuters, left and right, weaving and wheeling my way through the crowds and chaos. And I inhale the image of my gorgeous partner, shaking, so lovely in her laughing fit.