The Trickster Diaries, part 3/Chapter 14

Coffee. Wash face. Dress. Just enough time for a run down the hill and back up. Next the anticipated text from Sabrina. “Breakfast,” she writes. So I run back down the hill where her bus waits, discreetly parked in the shade of an oak.
Me: My weekend? Good. I sort of fell in love with this haiku by Senzaki, ordered the book and, to my delight, the first third is all about the 48 Zen koans. Senzaki’s analysis, I mean.
Sabrina: I have no idea what you just said.
Me: Yeah, I know. How was yours?
Sabrina: It was OK. Stinky girl came over, broke some furniture. My husband forgot to take the ham out of the freezer. OK, so, (hands me six bucks), I want a small caramel frappe, no drizzle, no whipped cream, and a sausage and cheese biscuit.

Sabrina is kind of the Dennis Rodman of bus driver land. Different do everyday. Sometimes cornrow, sometimes dreads, sometimes Afro, sometimes straight. But I’d never seen it straight and blonde before. Not at the same time, anyhow.
Me: Geez, I love your hair. I’m gonna sniff it.
Sabrina: No you ain’t.
Me: Am too.
So I do. She giggles.
Coconut.
“Oh, and strawberry jelly,” she says as I step off the bus, parked now in front of McDonald’s. Sausage and cheese biscuit sounds good, so I order two, and a water.
Back in the bus, driving, munching, talking, when suddenly…
Me: OMFreakingGod!!!
Sabrina takes her foot off the gas. Her eyes simultaneously dart to the rearview mirror.
Me: No no. (Laughing) It’s OK. I just ran into a strawberry jelly pocket. Jesus, just kill me. Right now. Between the way your hair smells and that jelly pocket, now — right NOW — would be the perfect time to die. No. Take it back. First a long, deep drag on a Dunhill. Then kill me.

She drops me at the market. Time to kill. Too bad it’s so early or I really would go into Liz’s shop, buy a pack of Dunhills. Who gives a shit if they’re 12 bucks. Then again, tomorrow’s the day Eli, Liz’s six year old, goes in for thyroid surgery.
There are people better at empathy than I.

One koan involves the master severing a young monk’s finger.