A Helicopter Lands At The Bus Stop/Men With Big Umbrellas
Lots of changes in the bus stop line up. Timetables, Scruffy Insurance Guy and Annabel Lee have stopped riding the bus.
Even John the Baptist, who added a bit of color, but must have found greener pastures in which to share his message of redemption.
Freckles is still around but she sits alone now and stares out the window. Scout is growing more and more confused each day. He often falls asleep and forgets his stop, then wakes with a start and jumps up into the aisle of the bus in panic.
The morning bus stop — an island of hope in a dark city — can be a lonely place. I’m always on alert for killer clowns.
Someone has swept away all the fallen leaves from the bus stop sidewalk. A fan of Summer, I suppose, trying to make it look as if Autumn never happened. But the wind in the trees tells a different story. It hisses and whines, causing the dry leaves that remain to applaud the effort to deceive, their tiny hands reaching toward winter.
Watching Scout’s health diminish a little more each day presents a challenge to me. I sense the importance, as the chronicler of these strange events, to remain dispassionate. Yet the empath in me struggles to remain detached. Scout arrived late today and appeared disoriented. Rather than take up his usual position in the center of the intersection, he went instead to stand before a shabby tree, to which he made a reverent libation of coffee. His grand gestures as he poured the coffee out at the base of the tree reminded me of an old priest in some forgotten temple going through rituals that fell out of fashion long ago. When he finished, he turned to all of us and announced that Thor’s Hammer was about to fall. I hope it wasn’t a portent of the upcoming presidential election.
Distraction at the bus stop this evening when a helicopter landed in the parking lot behind us. Everyone was so busy taking pictures that they forgot to get on the bus. The driver finally yelled “Are ya coming with me or are ya taking the choppah home tonight ?!”
It just occurred to me that I don’t write much about the bus drivers. Because the MBTA changes out the drivers on a regular basis, I’ve had the experience of riding with many of them. Most drivers are ordinary people, kind and professional, trying to make a honest living like the rest of us. Many of them struggle with the basics like how to apply the brakes without sending riders airborne. And a few have really stood out such as Dr Doolittle who wears white framed over-sized sun glasses and lines up all of his stuffed animals on top of the dashboard in front of him. But this morning’s driver definitely deserves a mention. A fashionable type, with a Gucci scarf draped across her shoulders and an expensive handbag swinging from the side of the token machine. Gucci turned out to be a “take no prisoner” kind of driver, startling the sleepy eyed passengers with her running dialogue with other drivers. “Yeah, you! You have to be an ***hole this early in the morning? ****ing unbelievable you miserable son of a *itch!” (Leaning heavily on the horn) “Yeah, that’s right! And what are you going to do about it?”
So it’s raining at the bus stop tonight, really coming down, and most of us are waiting inside the shelter. It’s not like we don’t have umbrellas, but why stand in the rain if you don’t have to, right? Besides the umbrellas are all average sized standard issue. Google comes striding down the street. He has this huge umbrella. I mean triple X. The thing was so big that families 4 blocks away were suddenly saying”did it just stop raining?” In typical show off fashion, Google stands outside the shelter posing with his fabulous umbrella. He has this smug look on his face.
Maybe it’s just me, but the bus stop “libation tree” seems much happier as a result of Scout’s daily ministrations. Perhaps Cervantes was on point when he wrote “Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
You know it’s Halloween morning when you see someone running and wonder what they are running from.
So difficult not to unintentionally offend on Halloween — you’re tempted to say “great costume!” but are inwardly apprehensive that people always dress like that.
On Halloween night’s commute home I saw a ballerina, a pirate, a devil, an angel, three cats, a baseball playah, some sort of mythic figure wearing a gold crown and three witches — and those were just the adults.
