2.27.2009

getting there

It sure is beautiful out.

There is a book lying open in my lap but it is, in fact, so beautiful out that I have grown distracted and started looking out the streetcar window.

I turn my head from the window towards where he is sitting. Sure is! I say, upbeat but noncommittal, and return to the window.

Talking to strangers is one of the pleasures of public transportation for me, but I’m not right now in the mood. I am reading a good book. And besides that I don’t usually get to take the streetcar, and its route runs through neat little neighborhoods. I have purposely taken a seat next to the window with an empty seat beside it.

I was just at the hospital, he continues. Sigh, I think. This is not just going to be an unwelcome conversation. It is going to be an unwelcome conversation of oversharing.

I reluctantly turn again. He explains how a bike accident several months ago messed up his leg. How he re-injured it this week. Each time I offer a polite response and turn back to the window, he continues. He speaks across the aisle and the empty seat between us. How he has found a specialist, the best specialist, at this hospital, Dr. So-and-so, how they took an MRI this morning and hopefully it can be fixed with therapy. He doesn’t want surgery. This is the point he returns to.

After four stops a young woman gets on and sits in the seat between us. There we go, I think, but he continues, just as before, so that she has to lean back awkwardly to stay out of the way. Eventually he trails off. I go back to the view. The woman gets up and a man with a cane slides into her place.

I was just at the hospital, says Bike Accident to the new audience. The man with the cane looks at him carefully. Me too, he says.

They exchange stories. Rather, Bike Accident delivers his same story again, while the man with the cane tries to engage him in exchange. They were, after all, both just at the hospital. But Bike Accident has a lot to say. It is hard for him to listen.

The man with the cane is a good listener. He adjusts. He is 71. I learn more about him from what he doesn't say. He is calm. He doesn’t seem bothered when his comments go unnoticed. Bike Accident eventually takes a breather.

I’m curious about this book you’re reading, says the man with the cane. I like the title, he says. I realize he is talking to me. I turn and smile. The book in my lap is A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

It’s a book of short stories, I say. I’ve only read two so far.

He looks at the cover, at the name of the author, Flannery O’Conner. I love that Irish brogue they use, he says. And he smiles a smile of communion. He is probably picturing the author as a reclusive hard-drinking Irishman rather than a twenty-something Southern Gothic catholic girl, but I am glad that my book has pleased him.

Bike Accident picks up again. He brings it around from his injury to the habits of his brother, or father, or stepfather – I am getting my things together to get off so I don’t hear the details. Only that this person yells a lot, that Bicycle Accident doesn’t like being around him. There is something about alcohol.

The man with the cane frowns at the relative’s difficult behavior. You have to learn to love yourself, he says, as advice to the absent relative, and then that love comes out on other people. It is such an honest thing to say on a streetcar.

Good luck with your leg I say to Bicycle Accident as I get out, and I look in his eyes, and I mean it. Enjoy the day says the man with the cane to me. Maybe I’ll be seventy one before I’m the person I want to be, and maybe not even then. I’ll keep practicing.

posted by tortaluga @ 3:09 PM 0 comments

2.23.2009

blogging master cleanse

The problem with not blogging for such a very long time is that then there is a blog backlog in my brain, and I have trouble choosing just one thing to write about. So many things to write about that I don’t write about anything at all.

So I need to do a little purge. Purging posts are never the best but it seems to me to be the only way to move on.

It’s been a busy three weeks.

I could write about how Iowa came west again for the weekend, how we went dancing and drank cocktails and talked the way we used to talk when we both lived in Eugene, and how much I miss that. I could write about the game of Celebrities we put together – the lamest game of Celebrities I’ve ever played because the names people put in were all actual celebrities. No Sylvia Plath or C S Lewis. All Jay Z and Branjolina.

I could write about the weekend when my Cousin D came up from California, how we ate still-warm appam at the palatial Lake Oswego house of his college buddy, a house that took me twenty minutes to locate because I’ve lost my suburban sensibility. How we played pool downtown at a newly nonsmoky bar and took so long to clear the table that they asked us to quit. How my cousin, a cute and wickedly funny straight guy a few years older than me, recently bought a book called How to Meet Your Husband When You’re Over 35.

I could write about how the City of Portland is switching to a new online accounting system, how it’s driving everyone crazy, how it has made work into one long tragicomic folly with equal parts Dilbert and Office Space. How I’ve had to attend weekly training sessions, some of them two and a half hours long, in which sentences like the following are delivered in earnest: Just remember that what we used to call a Center Code in IBIS is now a Cost Center, or a Functional Area, in SAP, and you can easily recognize this number because it will be something like ESBS0000006, if it’s a Cost Center, but a Functional Area will instead look something like PUASBSRS0000BE- and isn’t that funny, that it starts PU, since it’s the sewer bureau! – but also don’t forget that sometimes a Cost Center is the same thing as a Cost Fund.

I could write a lot about how I went to Austin to meet the one-year-old daughter of my highschool friend, how this daughter makes the cutest frog sound I’ve ever heard, DIP-uhd-DIP-uhd-DIP-uhd, how we made fondue and lay in the sun, how in two days we ate a year’s worth of cheese and chocolate and marshmallows, and how I was introduced to Wii, in which my bowling skills far surpassed my drumming.

Or I could write about how I am falling in love, which would probably be the most fun thing to write about, because I’m at that part where I want to tell total strangers – that part where when someone in line with me at the grocery store says Man this line is slow I want to say Yes, but I’m falling in love. So maybe next time.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:05 AM 8 comments