Sunday, June 20, 2004
Priorities
I organize my mornings with care and deliberation with one primary purpose in mind: to get my head straight for another day in the cube, answering bassackwards phone calls and uncovering mistakes I’ve made in the preceding months. I try to arrange everything so I can step onto my bus with a veritable tabula rasa between my ears, a clean clear space where I can spend the ride doing a few cerebral calesthenics, nodding out to some mellow tuneage, and generally commuting downtown psychically as well as physically. I may not always do exactly the same things in precisely the same order, but always for the same ultimate goal - a calming, refreshing, stimulating ride in the gritty external environment of a bus but the cozy internal environment of my own pointy head.
A few weeks ago I saw my 38L pull up with fresh green light while I was still far too far from the corner, much less the stop on the other side of the street. An ordinary man would have given up, walked at a moderate pace and gotten the next bus whenever it decided to arrive. I, anything but ordinary, made an instant commitment to catch that bus and ran hard, launched off at the curb, pounded my tootsies across six lanes of traffic and just made it to the bus as the yellow light turned to red. I’d had to push the envelope and my comfort zone, but I’d made it and was well-pleased, having cut ten minutes of ugly fat off of my morning. But then I had to wrestle my bag, my iPod, my wallet all around me, reorganizing myself for my trip… I like to have all these good things set up in advance but this time I’d had to plunge into my commute all undone. I picked a spot to stand next to a tall and striking young woman in a sober business suit and began to fiddle with my accoutrements. The woman near me looked familiar, but then, they all do - I’ve been riding that line for so long that I’m often sure that I recognize total strangers even when I’ve never seen them before. I left the headphones on, knowing that my sense of recognition typically rings a false alarm.
“Dan!” I heard it but didn’t believe I’d heard it right. She then called me by my last name: “Mr. P~!” - a four-syllable gobstopper that only the indoctrinated can enunciate so trippingly. I turned toward her smiling face, pulled off the ‘phones and responded with debonnaire suavitude: “Guh-dee guh-dee guh-dee drrrr guhdeeguhdee....” My mind was in foment. Was this the woman I’d met eighteen months ago at Nool and Deb’s wedding? She did live in SF, but not near me, and she was tall but a bit darker, and what’s more, she would have been extremely unlikely to have remembered my name…
“It’s Jackie. Jackie C~. From bargaining? LA?” That’s when the light went on. I hadn’t thought of her initially because she’s supposed to be living 400 miles away - but as it turns out, she’s just transferred to the SF office and moved about 15 blocks up Geary away from me. We had a good chat all the way in, rambling and chuckling, catching up, sharing a few common rants.
It was great to run into her, better yet that one of the few people at my company whose company I actually enjoy will now occasionally cross my path, maybe even for a plate of chow or a bucket of brew. But once the pleasant ride was too-quickly over and I got to my desk and sat down, genuinely pleased to have reestablished this connection, I realized that I was still a good half-hour of mental site-clearing away from being where I wanted to be, brain-wise. Oh, whatever, what the hell. So I’m incompetent for 40 minutes. So what? A good conversation is a much better bargain, and a friendship is so much more worthwhile than a calm and orderly mind.
Postscript: just a few days ago I was sitting at my desk, contemplating the salad I’d made and stuffed into a plastic bowl for myself for lunch. Instead of taking a formal lunch break I usually sit at my desk and shovel salad down my piehole, taking a few minutes to surf around, straighten my spine, and catch up with whatever household business I’d brought along with me for the day. But, after close to a month of having not even seen Jackie in the halls, she emailed me and suggested we take our lunches outside and eat them by the wharf two blocks from the office. I hastened to accede. That particular day I’d forgotten to bring a hat, and as we supped and discussed all manner of meaningless stuff, great literature and herpitology and a little bit of gossip just to keep my hand in, my pale shiny pate got lightly crisped under the sun’s actinic rays. Even so, it was a good deal. The sunburn has since faded and been absorbed into my too-forgiving flesh, but the pleasure of conversation over lunch lingers still.
