Representin'! or People. Huh.

The bus, this morning, smells of hot dish.  Some sort of tomato-based, Italian-sausaged, crusty-cheese-topped hot dish. 

It is 6:35 am, and I am ready for dinner.

What time did this person get up, anyway?

For the uninitiated, there are many potential smells to the bus.  The February unwashed-winter-coat smell of the horror of middle winter.  The weed-y What?-I’m-holding-this-for-a-friend smell creeping from backpacks.  Smells of flowers bought at the farmers’ market, of exuberant cologne wearers, of wet hairspray.

Generally, though the bus smells of nothing. 

Impressive, no?

How do they do it?  Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people that ride a bus in a day,  can it be that the majority of us are reasonable human beings?

I got into a conversation the other day.

"I don't know how you do it," she said.  "Riding the bus?"  She shudders, shaking her head.  "Ugh.  So dirty.  All those people.  You just don't know what kind of person you're dealing with."

"Weird," I said, "that's what they say about you."

And didn't that get me a look.

I took a good look around today.  Just who are we dealing with?  The guy who wears long sleeves no matter the weather, the psoriasis peeping from his wrists.  The woman, dab-dab-dabbing moisturizer on her face for the three miles downtown.  The man in the business suit and track shoes, reading 1984.  The woman who went from slender to pregnant to mother of a six year old -- she shakes now, relies on a cane -- maybe early 30s.  The man with the pointy head, traveling with a boombox and usually dressed as an NBA player, circa 1976.  The middle-aged lady in sensible heels and a jaunty hat, her purse balanced on her lap, waiting...

Bus Friend Sandy boards.  "Look at you," she says, sitting down.  "All dressed up."

I smile at her.  "Just holding up my end of the bargain," I say.

Just Shut Up and Ride

Having been reminded this last weekend of physical frailties in general, and the tensile strength of your average pair of capris specifically, I lean against the back of the bus seat, willing myself to relax after a full day of work.  It is particularly after a good stiff Monday that I find myself with the bearing of an irritable Theodore Roosevelt, so I slump a little – just a little! – and think soft, abstract thoughts.

The bus driver, a portly man looking suspiciously like a biker-ish version of Sebastian Cabot, has the most elaborately macramé-ed earring I have ever seen.  A vivid blue, it dangles past his shoulder, swings as he turns his head to check his mirrors.  A tiny bell from the end of it rings as he calls out the stops.

“Next stop, Spring Street.”

I wonder about people, about the patches on their jackets, about the tattoos on their arms, the memories and stories behind them.  There was a man on the bus last summer, a thin, rough-looking man, pocks on his cheeks, his thinning hair pulled into a pony tail, the thighs of his jeans wearing through over the pockets.  Among the visible tattoos on his arms was the head and upper torso of a smiling child with what appeared to be dates inked in a filigreed scroll at his wrist. 

The tattoo of the smiling child was too heart-breaking to consider, and so I wrote it down, to consider it another time.

I wonder, now, if the earring has that sort of sentimental value.  Did a permanently capitalized She from his past make it for him?  Did he buy it at an art fair?  Did he find it?

We don’t know, do we?

And we won’t.  As they will not know about us.

Maybe I Should Reevaluate

I am standing on Hennepin Avenue, waiting for a bus.

Hennepin, as you may recall, is the only street in the world where I have been mistaken for a prostitute.

Twice.

Today, however, I am not mistaken for a prostitute but an ATM.

“Do you have any change?”

I look at her.  “Yes,” I deadpan.

"Can I have some?"

"No."

She moves on to the next person.

By the time the bus arrives, I have been standing in the sun for a full 40 minutes -- which, by the way, is enough time to freckle yet retain office pallor.  

It is a good ten minutes into the ride that I realize that this is not my beautiful bus (with apologies to The Talking Heads).  The funny thing is that, once you’ve boarded a bus, there’s no real way of knowing what bus you’re on.  I mean, sure, you could ask someone, but where’s the sport?

Behind the bus driver is a wall of bus schedules.  I’m on either the 18 or the 11.  The 18 would’ve dropped me off a few blocks ago.  The 11 takes me roughly 12 blocks from home.

Eventually I de-bus and point my feet in the correct direction.  Less than a block in front of me is a weathered man dressed for urban camping.  He appears to be speaking into what may or may not be a walkie-talkie.  

When I reach him, I stop, look at what he's looking at. On the ground, lying in the grass and reaching for the hedge there is a white squirrel.  He is perfect, no trauma, and yet he is dead.  

“He is never going to reach that hedge,” I say.

The man with the walkie talkie gives me a stern look.  “But ya just gotta keep reaching, right?”

And I walk home thinking about that.

A Morning on the Bus with My Peeps

The woman on the bus is taking up some space. 

She sits across the seats as if stretched out in the back of my old Ford LTD.   Her feet extend into the aisle, and those of us boarding – a term also used in the air transportation business, I believe – clear her boots gingerly.

She is rough looking, perhaps she has slept outside.  Her age is difficult to guess, her skin sun damaged, her eyes hard. 

I grumble internally, briefly, as I ponder the hubris.  The bus is full, as I have taken the second to the last seat.  If anyone wants to sit, they will have to ask her to move; and this being Minnesota, I’m guessing only one out of 20 would.

We don’t like confrontation.

But we will grumble to ourselves.

I judge her for a minute or two.  In the end I decide that perhaps this is all she has, the imperious demand for not one but two seats.  She’s only going to pay for one, dagnabbit, but she’s taking two.

I shrug, internally.  So have two.

There is a clatter at the front of the bus, and I watch a smiling, dimpled man in a suit, a recent immigrant from India, chase a water bottle.  For the next 30 seconds I watch as the thermos rolls, just ahead of his outstretched hands.  Out of his bag, it rolls under his seat, across the aisle, under two more seats to where it finally rests next to the duffel bag that Two Seats has on the floor.

He straightens up.  He smiles, says something I cannot hear and leans in to pick up the bottle, whereupon he returns to his seat.

And she smiles, slowly, pulls a phone out of her pocket and begins texting.

Pleased to Meet Me

According to the scrolling marquee at the front of the bus, today’s date is 10/23/34.

I turn away from it, return to my Springtime Revelry, required of all Minneapolitans, wherein we gaze lovingly at the green, green, green of a well-deserved spring.

It’s October, 2034, you say.

I feel as if I should be more concerned about that.  My bills, for instance.  Am I current?

Or perhaps it’s 1934, in which case I am earlier for work than I’ve ever been. 

I am struggling with which scenario I prefer when the bus comes to a stop.  A young woman settles into the seat next to me. 

I wait.  It’s been a full two seasons since I’ve last seen her.  Does she still do it?  Will she do it now?  I can wait for – I pull out my phone, check the time.  I can wait for another nine minutes.

I got all morning, lady.

And just like that, my patience is rewarded.  She opens her purse, pulls out a small zippered bag from which she pulls out a small bottle.  From this bottle she squeezes perfect, candy-button sized daubs of lotion onto her fingertips.  Dab. Dab dab dab.  The ends of her fingers dance, lightly, across her cheeks, her chin, up on to her forehead and down the line of her nose.  Dab.  She isn’t rubbing.  She isn’t smoothing.  It’s far more delicate than that.  Her fingertips touch delicately upon her flesh.  She is young, she is moderately attractive, and dagnabit, her skin is hydrated and dewy and it’s going to stay that way.

I look out the window.  I want to stop her, want to tell her that she is going to look as young as she does right up until she doesn’t, that with bone structure like hers, moderate attention to her diet and exercise, she will be judged much younger than she is, right up until she isn’t.

I look back, quickly, to see her carefully, oh so carefully, massaging the lotion into her face.  She doesn’t stop until two minutes before I get off the bus.

What year is it?

It’s both sooner and later than we think it is.  

Seems Like About 20%; or Yeah, But How Was the Service?

The morning sky is a powdery blue, the clouds edged with a salmon color that really sets off the red in my eyes.

I don’t sleep well, a fact that I feel the need to repeat every now and then. 

Hello.  How are you?  Me, I didn’t sleep well last night.

But I do what I do, as I must, every morning.  Not only does my alarm clock demand this of me, but Dolly Gee Squeakers, formerly of the Humane Society Squeakers, relies on our routines:  the alarm clock, the slap-slap-slap of the snooze button, teeth/hair/lunch/dress/treats for the kitty and then out the door.

Monday through Friday, between the hours of 5:32 and 6:34. 

I cross a busy intersection, imagining that I look crisp and business-like, stepping smartly from road to curb.  I feel urbane and glamorous, no small feat at this time of morning.  Summer is returned, and all things are possible.  The weather has ceased its six-month-long killing spree, the birds have returned and have much to say, the sidewalk is free of ice and full of underwear…

I look down, step over a pair of pink lace and leopard-skin-patterned underwear.  They are neither old nor new.  I decide, for my own sake, to think of them as clean.

They are on the walk way directly in front of restaurant nearest the bus stop.

I stop, back up.  Whose are they?  Does she know they are gone? Were they hurled from an open car window?  Were they left here, in front of the restaurant, in exchange for services rendered?

I move on, reach the bus stop, whereupon I board the stopped bus, waving my scan-able bus card in front of the scan-able bus card reader.  I sit, as I always do, near the rear of the bus and stare out the window at the newly-leafed trees.

Have I been tipping incorrectly all these years?

Sneezy Rider

Monday morning:  After a brief dabbling into sidewalk ice-dancing, followed by a light bit of graffiti-scraping at the bus stop (whoever Coni is, he has clearly mistaken my bus stop for his), I found myself feeling my forehead with the back of my hand.

Am I feverish?

My head!  My head is enormous!  Was it this big when I left home this morning?  And my ears – does anyone else hear that buzzing?  And the eyeballs.  What’s with my eyeballs? 

I take out a compact, take a look. 

Holy cow, did I look like this when I left the house?

And that’s when the coughing begins.  And with each cough comes the explosions in my head – near the front, somewhere between knowing how to crochet and my scheme on how to notify someone that I am in distress (it involves holding and actually drinking a Bud Lite).

For decades, I have banked on the words of a blue-lidded dental hygienist.  Palpating the glands on each side of my jaw, she had said, “You never get sick.”

And since that day, I have relied on her wise words.  Do I get sick?  I do not.  And you want to know why?  Because a dental hygienist in the 80s told me that I didn’t.

But here I am.  With every cough, bits of my brain are hurtled toward the cranium, my eyes pop and water, my throat burns with indignity. 

I never get sick.

Unless, of course, I do.

Send soup and foot rubs. 

I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke

It’s dark out. 

This does not surprise me, of course, as it’s been dark since, oh, I dunno, 2012?  It is winter.  We go to work in the dark.

And we return in the dark.

It’s easy to get caught up in the gloom. 

The woman on the bus directly in front of me is a regular.  I’ve seen her get on and off the bus for several years now.  Bundled from head to foot, all five feet of her speaks of separateness.  She is an immigrant, dark skinned and dark eyed.  She sits on the aisle side of the seat, keeping the window seat empty.  This is considered somewhat rude, for the most part, but we Minnesotans are a non-confrontational little group, and so she sits alone. 

There are three high school students that get on three stops after I do.  As a bus, we’ve watched them and their school uniforms grow up. 

Today one of them is tearing through his pockets, his backpack, in a manner all bus riders know and dread.

Where is my bus pass?

The bus pulls away – we have a timetable to adhere to, while they all search for money.

It appears that no one is carrying cash.

The woman in the seat ahead of me stands.  She walks briskly down the aisle, holding out the $2.25 fare.

“Here,” she says in accented English.  “Go to school.”

She walks back to her seat – and after a moment’s hesitation, slides to the seat next to the window.

Something akin to an electric shock runs through my body.  I lean forward, put my hand on her shoulder.  She turns to me.

“That was such a nice thing to do,” I say.  “Hi.  My name is Pearl.”

What is that emotion on her face? 

“My name is Esperanza,” she says.

And we smile at each other.

“Happy Monday,” I say.

“Yes,” she says thoughtfully.  “A happy Monday.”

The Fog on the Windows

The bus is a mess.

And why shouldn’t it be?  It’s rush hour, after all, and we’ve packed ourselves in, a random sampling of Midwestern commuters.

Women seasonally ensconced in mobile sleeping bags? 

Teenagers wearing giant panda heads for hats? 

Random dudes of all ages dressed, so help me, in shorts and windbreakers?

Yup.

Anecdotal evidence would lead one to believe that bus ridership goes up in the winter – or perhaps it’s just that we all appear to be so much bigger, what with our overstuffed coats and our giant panda headgear; and so I am relieved to have a window seat.  

I am staring straight ahead when they get on at the Light Rail stop. 

There has been damage, somewhere along the line, to this couple.  Not born to it, perhaps, but acquired during a car accident, maybe.  I imagine that the world appears to them as if it is underwater, or possibly as if viewed through a mist.  They move slowly, looking for seats together.

There haven’t been two open seats next to each other for at least five blocks.

The man across the aisle from me stands, calling “Back door!” and exits.  Through experience, I know his stop is not for another two blocks, but I’ve seen this before.  He’s making room.

The man who had been seated next to him stands, moves toward the exit.  “I need to stretch,” he says to the couple.

They move to the seats.  “Affa you,” the man says.  The woman smiles.  She sits, proclaims, “I’m hungry!”

He laughs. 

They both laugh.

And I smile and use a finger to draw a smiley face on the fogged window next to me.  

Yet When He Closes His Eyes, He Dreams

He is a large man, not just for the bus, but for anywhere.  The back of his head, the set of his shoulders, speak of Vikings and lumberjacks.  Even the curl of his pink/freckle-speckled ears, large as soup bowls, seem to have come from another setting, a time when a man this size rode into town on a tornado, commandeered the wimmen folk and held back fate with the wave of a thick, meaty hand.

He’s in the seat ahead of me.

While a bit overweight, he could not, accurately, be described as “fat”.  He is a barrel-chested man, a man with a neck like a thigh and shoulders built for the weight of the world.  

He is a big man in a small world.

A woman sits next to him.  Small, the winter’s daily carb-intake memo no doubt lost in the mail, she fits nicely in the seat next to him.

The color crawls up his neck in a painfully slow display that something is amiss.  He fidgets, squishes his enormous shoulders against the window.  He twitches once, twice, pauses for a moment and then begins again.

It is excruciating to watch.  He cannot hold still.  His seatmate glances at him, glances at the space between them.  Is she in his space?  Are they touching?  No.  But he cannot stop himself; and over and over again, he presses away, squirmily making something from nothing. 

I close my eyes, and ,my mother’s voice hisses in my ear.  Stop that right now, she says.  Suddenly the man in front of me, 300 pounds if he’s an ounce, is wearing a frilly dress and a pair of Mary Janes.  His feet swing from the edge of the pew as my mother both scowls and offers half a stick of Juicy Fruit.

You sit still now.

I reach in my purse.

I don’t have any gum.  I cannot help this man.

The squirming becomes unbearable.  Even from behind him, the urge to lean over and smack him on the back of the head – cut that out! – is overwhelming, and eventually, the tiny woman sitting next to him stands up and moves away to sit next to someone else.

I watch the back of his neck as the color fades.

And Erik the Red goes back to staring out the window at a world too small for him.  

Just How Many Times Did I Hit That Snooze, Anyway?

It’s dark again.

Not in that delightful what’s-the-point-all-is-lost way that I sometimes have, but in a literal, pupil-widening way that is thrust upon us every year about this time.

This Daylight Savings Time, that is.

You didn’t think spring was going to just happen, did you?  Oh, no.  One must earn spring.  One must yearn for it, watch for it, take up a collection and bribe it with promises of pedicures, of charcoal briquettes and jaunty little hats that say, “What?  Protect you from frost bite?  That’s someone else’s job!”

Plunged by Benjamin Franklin’s idea of a joke back into the darkness of the morning commute, I have time for these thoughts.  There is little to distract one, after all, when nature thinks it’s 5:30. 

It’s a hard life.

Once aboard the bus, jacketed in the drowsy goodwill of my early-morning compatriots, I can’t help but notice that there, at the front of the bus, scrolling on the marquee that shares time, date, and whether or not a stop has been requested, is today’s date:  10/25/34.

Holy moley.  No wonder it’s dark out.  I’ve stumbled into another dimension.

You know, I thought it would be dark in here; but I was also expecting humming and flashing lights, maybe the smell of cigarette smoke or the sudden inexplicable appearance of a cheese Danish. 

I frown, as is my wont, in concentration.  What an odd date.  1/2/03 I could understand. 1/11/11 would make me happy as well. 

But it’s not about me being happy, not this time.

Nope.  This time it's just me, in the dark, wondering if I’m terribly early or terribly late.

Don’t Forget to Tip Your Waitstaff

The bus driver, a cheery man in a Metropolitan Transit-issued sweater, is rotated through to the #17 on perhaps a quarterly basis.  A smiling, whimsical person, he brings his whole personality to work. 

In accordance with my belief that one does not simply trip about the streets completely unaware, I am wearing only one earbud.  

“Approaching Central, guvnah” he calls. 

I blink, grinning, into the gray dawn of a February morning in Minnesota, a single-digit affair swaddled in natural fibers and, increasingly, a layer of protective fat, and realize that the bus driver has just made an announcement in a Cockney accent. 

I turn my iPod down significantly.   

“Washington Avenue,” he sings.  I look around the bus – is that a Carol Channing impersonation?

But unlike the day that a small child and I were the only witnesses to a full-grown elephant relieving itself outside of the Target Center onto a snow bank many years ago, I am alone in my observation. 

“Approaching Marquette,” the bus driver stage-whispers, “and aiming for the Nicollet Mall.  Next stop, the 3, the 14, and let us never forget the 15,” he says darkly, “transfer point.”  I watch him via the rearview mirror as he shudders in horror.   “Transfer point,” he intones. 

A block or two later, and the bus comes to a complete stop.  The front doors open as the commuting public, still struggling with varying degrees of disbelief regarding the start of a new work week, mounts the steps, waves bus passes before the card reader.  

“Welcome,” the bus driver says – and is that a Boston accent now?  “Welcome to yuh mawnin’ commute.”