spring-storm musings

It is morally and socially—sociomorally—impermissible to look at one’s watch when a wheelchair-bound passenger or someone in circumstances otherwise requiring the special lift is getting on or off the bus. It’s a classic tenet of bus etiquette. Others include: remove your big-ass bag from the seat next to you when the bus gets full, although while there are still empty window seats this should not be necessary; do not talk on your cell phone while paying your fare, as if the driver were your personal servant; do not let your kids touch/sneeze on/bug me. Although I might be a bit touchier about that last one than most.

Anyway. So, inevitably, the instant that familiar beep-beep-beeping begins I am seized with the overpowering urge to check the time. It practically kills me to sit there without lifting my wrist to check on the seconds as they go tick-tick-ticking away. I know part of it is probably just that lure of the forbidden, that “gee, I didn’t really want it but now that I can’t have it it’s all I can think about,” but I think it’s also my incredible natural bitchiness coming through. I mean, come on, people. I’m trying to get to work here. I’m lazy and can�t get my ass out of bed in the morning, so now I’m in a huge fucking hurry. Could we PLEASE move this along?

It’s reprehensible. I know. But I’m like that.

On that same topic of proper bus behavior, though, please feel perfectly free to do quirky urban things like eat your buttered toast, still so fresh and fragrant that it makes my stomach growl, while crumbs crumble down all over your striped uptown-girl tights. Or regale the driver with long, cheerful detail about your day, and how on nice warm afternoons like this you still miss your lady friend, the stewardess who had seen the world and who—before you lost her to cancer—used to call on sunny days and say, “Hey honey, let’s go to the lake.” And follow that up with a story about how you saw two ducks flying together today, and how every time one turned left, so did the other one, over and over. And how that was the damnedest thing. And then laugh and laugh, delightedly and full of summer-blue skies, waves lapping against the shore, dinners at sunset, and long drives home.

Here, and now, it’s neither sunny nor warm. I haven’t been at the lake. It’s storming, and my gentleman friend is a thousand miles away. But the cat just climbed into the bookcase. It was the damnedest thing.