Written Drawings
The buses rumble down Market Street like armored tanks in battle, daring cars to try and turn in front of them and forcing would-be jaywalkers to scurry back onto the safety of the curbs they are so much in a hurry to vacate. Streets during rush hour in Philly are almost as crowded as those in New York, and one needs to protect oneself from self-absorbed idiots lost in their cell phones with no clue of the world moving around them. Walking quickly to go somewhere, anywhere, no matter how important or unimportant my destination was, was a way of life for me. It just seemed that if you had to get somewhere, you might as well get there quickly if you were going to get there at all. Everyone who knows me well tells me to slow down, and I know they are right. My body seems to rebel anytime that it feels like things are moving too slow, and my feet pick up the pace as if in response to auto-control. And so, with caution, skill, and dexterity I rapidly maneuver through the city streets to the train station.
Ah now, let me settle down in my favorite seat, give my aching feet a rest, and cool off. It is a long walk to the train station from Chestnut and 27th Street, especially on this hot June day. I was still calming down from the last customer I served in the bookstore who was particularly annoying. He was an elderly man who was requesting that I find him a new mystery novel taking place in any European country. The request was not so unusual, but it was the way he spoke to me. He had a whining, demanding tone to his request that struck a nerve, long and repeatedly enervated by my domineering father.
My relationship with my father, or more realistically my lack of a relationship, was the reason I left my home on the posh Pennsylvania Mainline as soon as I turned 18. I worked like a dog to put myself through Temple University, living in the most decrepit apartment in North Philly and surviving mostly on tuna fish and spaghetti.
I need to take a deep breath and recognize that I am being irrational when it comes to being so rankled by this elderly gentleman. He is probably lonely and searching for a good book to afford him an escape from his solitary existence and was totally unaware of his verbal presentation. He certainly could not have been out to annoy me like my father always set out to achieve. After all, I was the black sheep of the family, the only offspring of five that refused to join his mega profitable company. I sure miss my mother, but she would never openly cross my father even though I know she supports my independence. She found a way to secretly deposit small amounts of money into my bank account all through my college years behind my father’s back.
Now that I have calmed down a little, I can relax for a half an hour before my 4:30 train comes in; that is, if it is on time for once this week. I have become far more tolerant of the delays since my live-in girlfriend of two years left me for an older, wealthy man last month. I used to be so anxious to get home after a long day at work to talk to her and to hold her close to me. After much hurt and self-reflections, I stopped the self-recriminations and decided it was time to move on. Even though I know that Dawn left me for riches, right now it feels like I will never get over that sense of being inadequate and perhaps unattractive. And yet, when I look in the mirror, I see a six-foot-tall young man with auburn, almost black hair, matching dark brown eyes, and reasonably attractive features.
It has been too hard to start the dating thing again. Patience, I know at the tender age of 26 relationships will return, eventually. As I am momentarily tormented by these thoughts, I fight through them and decide to relax and watch the waning sun send its shimmering tendrils through the high windows of the 30th Street train station. The massive sitting room is illuminated like a cathedral with its throngs waiting for the sermon to begin.
It is so interesting to watch how people pass through space; some stroll through unhurried, absorbing the beauty around them, while others speed through unaware and indifferent to all that they pass. Some, like me, sit on the pew-like benches waiting for their trains, which affords me the opportunity to draw their characters in words that I can later incorporate into my stories. Some people I see almost every day while others are one-time actors in my scenario who make an impression in my notebook and then fade away. I never have time to observe people in the same way in the small Philly bookstore where I work since someone always seems to want to ask me a question just when an interesting person is browsing through the store. At other times there is no one in the store, leaving me time to read a new book or write a passage in my novel that is slowly moving forward about the cruel behavior of members within a family dynamic. My readings were somewhat limited during my graduate school years when I was working towards my master’s degree in classical literature. Now the whole literary world is at my beck and call.
A young lady dressed in blue sits down across from me; I have seen her before, but she always sat down with her back to me, so I was unable to capture her in my book. This time, the bench she usually sits on was occupied by a family with three somewhat raucous children, happily driving her to sit opposite me and giving me the opportunity to draw her. She is a tall, confident woman with naturally multi-colored hair that swirls in choreographed disorder as the sunlight flickers through its strands. Her hair frames her soft features that seem to have been molded from the most beautiful, pliable clay. Her large, dark, penetrating eyes appear to be capable of attracting all that surrounds them drawing images into a vortex that are trapped within forever. The cuffs of her shirt sleeves wrapped around her wrists, unbuttoned with one folded up slightly and the other fully draping most of her left hand, as if to say my right hand is busy and my left hand is at rest. Her fingertips are stained with different colored paints, and there are playful drops of brightly colored paints on her shirt and on her jeans. Her old canvas tennis shoes are like a palate full of all the lively colors that adorn her paintings. Her socks are different colors announcing, “I don’t give a damn for the latest fashions.”
Her mouth moves ever so slightly as her eyes pause upon one person after another that passes us by or sits down near us. At times, the edges of her lips curl up with pleasure as she reflects upon happy thoughts engendered by an older fatherly gentleman reading his newspaper. Perhaps he reminds her of her own father who loved to play with her and told her how good she was. Her pained countenance when a young mother was scolding her daughter for playfully skipping around between the benches appeared to mirror the constant scorn she receives from her mother’s displeasure that she is still single and wasting her time painting strange pictures that no one buys. I assume that she is single since her fingers are totally unadorned with any jewelry.
I was so absorbed with this woman that I almost missed my train, and I would have had it not been for the fact that she too rose to get her train. For a moment it seemed that she took note of me, and our eyes bid each other adieu. Somehow, I get the feeling that this is the beginning, not the end.
Tomorrow is Saturday and I promised Matt that I would help him move to his girlfriend’s house. My weekends have been pretty empty since Dawn left me last month, and it is a comfort to spend time helping someone else. It has been so hard to focus on my writing except for a few quiet times in the bookstore; the creative juices have turned into a dried-out oasis. I begin to doubt everything that I put down on paper, no one is interested, and I have still not been able to find a publisher for my first book.
I look forward to Monday when perhaps I will get the chance to see that painter lady again. Then, as I rush up the stairs to my train, caught up in the wave of fellow passengers, like the waves that climb up the sea wall, I just want to get home, cook my dinner, and curl up on the sofa to finish my Hemingway novel while listening to Beethoven’s violin concerto in D.
