Okie(s) in Florida

I like women. That’s why I married one.

But sometimes the habits of women amuse me. Today, while waiting on the elevator for the parking garage, a woman about my age was also standing in the small foyer. She was wearing this flowery dress thing, a little low-cut (no, I am not being a pervert you jerks — this detail’s importance comes in a bit), a small half-sweater thingy that all you girlies wear these days, and heels.

There’s a sign on the wall reminding you of the floor on which you park.

I look down, minding my own business. When I look up, she’s attempting to use a faint reflection in the sign to fix her hair.

“Ok,” I think. “She’s just being a woman. Probably lots of men have checked their reflection in that sign, as well.”

Then she starts swiping at her sweater. I guess she was trying to get the lint off. But it was an almost obsessive-compulsive swipe.

“Man, this woman is complicated,” I think.

Then I look out the window at a car pulling into the garage and look back. She is doing that shimmy women do when trying to adjust their boobs in a l0w-cut dress. I mean, it’s a full-blown “get my boobs and bra up” shimmy (or whatever it is ya’ll are trying to do when you do this). You know, the one you normally do in private. Don’t act like ya’ll don’t know.

She checks her reflection again.

Plays with her hair in the reflection.

Ding.

I tell Kathryn all the time that she’s complicated.

“I’m a woman,” she says. “What do you expect?”

But some women are more complicated than others. And us men, sometimes in our head we see a woman doing something — like walking through the mall with dozens of bags from a shopping spree — and think, “Thank God she’s not my problem.”

This was one of those times.