Monday, November 12, 2007
Schooled: Another Test Case On the Bus
that creaking sound is me grinding my jaws - we were just told that the workers will *not* be here today to tear holes in our front wall and frame in some new windows, which we really need badly - they have *something else* to do in *San Jose* so will not be favoring us with their presence. Regardless that they’ve scaffolded the house and then enrobed the scaffold with blue tarp so I can’t see out the front at all. Regardless that there’s a pile of torn-out wood and waste right outside the front door (inside the tarp drape) that I can literally taste as I rise from my bed in the morning. Regardless that we’ve just busted ass to roll up carpets, move couches, tarp over doorways, rearrange everything so that workers could get in easily. Now they’re saying, “maybe Wednesday.” And I know they’re full of it. Wednesday never comes.
Plus side: Lovely weekend with my dad, who rolled into town Thurs night and rolled out again this morning. Today is a holiday for me - I get mellow Zach hang-out time in the am with no rush-to-work buzzkill in the pm. Supper last night - a ground turkey and israeli couscous stirfry, with a little persimmon-red pepper harissa and a surprisingly irresistible acorn squash clafouti for dessert - was deeply fulfilling. I think my cough has mostly cleared up. I have a story to share. To wit:
It was just another morning, like so many I had endured in the preceding months and years. I took a seat on my inbound bus, the one where I don’t usually get to pick my favorite place to sit, but just take what’s left to me. This particular morning, what was left was a very good seat indeed - an in-facing left-side seat across from the rearmost exit doors. This seemed exceedingly lucky to me, as I tend to get queasy on the fore-facing seats and the big accordion doors in front of me promised a refeshing mix of people and fresh air. Perhaps, I dared imagine as I pulled out my notebook for a bit of a matutinal scrawl, someone interesting might take the empty spot next to me. But perhaps not, I admitted to myself. That was wishing rather a lot for such an ordinary morning.
My cynicism was soon gratified when, after a few more stops, a rider plopped down into the next seat to mine - a rider with all the hallmarks of not being interesting: a stolid Chinese woman of middling years, plainly and practically dressed, carrying a bulky canvas totesack and redolent of onions and sausage. I was confident immediately that she was there for the whole ride downtown, and reconciled myself to the corollary confidence that she’d be a quiet seatmate and would never bother me. I would have an introspective ride in.
We’d gone only ten blocks or so when I glanced up for an update on how the crowd around me was developing, and I noticed that my neighbor was actually peering over into my notebook at my illegible writings. She flicked her gaze back up at me, unapologetic. I gave her a brief, strained smile and went back to my page, and the pacifying inspiration of my earbuds.
But we’d made eye contact - truly a rarity between myself and persons such as she, with innumerable of whom I’d shared similarly proximate seats. Her eyes had been guarded and uncommunicative, but her, well, inscrutable expression stuck with me so much that, within another few blocks, I had to check her out again. She was peering again at the chickenscratch edits I was interleaving into the essay on my lap. This time I offered her my raised eyebrows - a reasonably clear invitation either to share what was on her mind or move on. I expected the latter. She, trumping expectations, took the invitation.
She wanted to know what I was working on, why, who was making me rewrite it so much. I explained, popping out an earbud, that I was writing for my own satisfaction, and that I was rewriting and re-rewriting because I found it difficult to get down on paper exactly what was going on in my mind. Oh, she understood, she assured me - writing was hard, and so was English. SO many rules, so many choices.
I agreed with her but she wasn’t waiting for me. We’d apparently hit upon a subject that aroused her, and she was on a roll. English! What nonsense! She was taking classes down at City College and her teacher was so mean! He’d mark her badly but not say why! He gave her poor marks for work better than those other guys who got better grades than her! He made up rules, just for her! She was a changed woman, a termagant, her brow clenched and her eyes ablaze, barking out bitterness at that ratbastard english teacher, make up rules, treats me worst, no fair bastard. All I could do was sit there and listen. She wasn’t mad at me. I was just along for the ride.
Her rancor was far from spent when we pulled up at Powell Street and she abruptly rose and left with a cheery “ok bye have fun with your writing” before vaporizing amid the sidewalks. I looked back down at the pages of my incomprehensible notebook, closed the cover, looked up again, and then turned to meet the gaze of a big solid guy facing forward in the seat at my right knee. He smirked and shook his head.
“Yeah, she crazy,” he said as if he felt obliged to make some acknowledgment of the tirade he’d witnessed, but not really wanting to initiate a conversation.
“I don’t know, man. You gotta talk to folk on the bus. Anyway, you gotta let them talk to you, if they really need to. You find out some wild stuff that way.”
He regarded me quizzically, maybe, for a moment, as the bus rolled toward its last few stops. Then he asked, “Really?”
