As the Polygon Turns (Episode 28): Mere Mortals

It is with some remorse and much reflection that my fingers take to clicking my keyboard to tap out the final episode of As the Polygon Turns.

Tuesday July 7th was my last bus ride in. I took the old standby 6:20. And as often happens in the life of mere mortals and non-movie stars, nothing particularly momentous happened. The usual characters whom we have come to find curious and amusing were either not there or simply less than amusing. But the bland ride in silence gave me time to reflect and dig back through my notes of the past couple of months when I have been so remiss in reporting their shenanigans.

So as sort of a medley of bus rides – not unlike the awful medleys we children of the 80s were made to sing in chorus – I will recap some of the past few month’s bus snippets.

4/14 Ah... Nice and toasty! I just got on the bus. There's a slight chill to the morning. It's been warm - t-shirt and shorts weather for sure - so the fact that it's a bit nippy out now makes it feel all the nippier. Well, my pal Bill has left the office for good, so now I must take up opening up the office at 6:45. And here I find myself taking a bus at a new time, sizing up a new bus gang. Some of my 6:20 riders have also made the switch at some time or another. There is eyepatch man (whom my husband calls ‘Cyclops’), Friendly Face and plenty of people from the street up the road who sit in "priority seating" when they really shouldn't. Hmmm.
One woman who just got on is sporting a pin on the collar of her jacket. For a split second I thought it was a collar device, as it is placed and spaced to about the same specifications as a military collar device. Before the better judgment of my saner self could stop me, I thought, “What's her rank, rate or specialty? Diamond doggie?” What a style! PLEASE!

This woman became a regular fixture in my morning. Upon closer inspection one morning, I realized that it was a cat, not a dog on her collar pin. As you will soon see, just a week later Kitty Collar developed a new way to catch my attention – and incur my vexation.

4/29 Hmmm. The lady in the barn coat with the kitty cat collar device just came aboard. Good, she sat in front of me – that means Smoker Chica won't be in front of me. Smoker Chica’s ash and second-hand toxins plague my sensitive little nose receptors from Braddock to the Beltway and beyond. And somehow, as has become the running joke between me and my new bus stop pal Kate, Smoker Chica seems to magnetically find a place near me – or at the very least within noseshot.
Uh, but wait--- Kitty Collar is wearing simply pungent perfume... My nose can't win!
Some other woman in pink, the color and size of watermelon flesh just sat next to her. Uh, wait, Smoker Chica’s just now getting on... I can't type fast enough... Thumbs don't fail me now... Smoker lady just sat down NEXT to me. Damnnnnnn. Well, no matter… I am already breathing like I have a cold on account of kitty collar's repugnant eau de toilette. Sigh.

One afternoon, I was a little early for the bus – or the bus was running late, which in essence is really the same thing – and as I stood idly in line, deleting sent and stupid emails on my crackberry, I noticed a somewhat sallow, upper middle-aged gentlemen holding a book just millimeters from his face – so close it looked like he was sniffing it rather than reading it. And he was taking the story in – whether by nose or by eyes – so fervently that I thought had he drank it through a straw he would surely have given himself a headache. Heck, come to think of it, if most people held their book that close to read or to sniff, it would likely make them dizzy. His must have been a real page-turner and he a novel hoover. Maybe it was a scratch and sniff book.

5/1 It’s May. It’s Monday.
“Good Morning, Gene!” someone calls out as Friendly Face climbs aboard.
"Eh, ah, oh eh, ah, yeah, hey, morning, Monday again!" The salutations ring out then simmer to mumbles behind me like a pot turned down on the stove. But as each new familiar face comes aboard, they rise and fall again.
The 5:57 bus is remarkably voluble this morning. It's pouring outside, and the word is the previous bus didn't show. Some people, whether by their words or their clothes, seem to insist on making the wet weather wholly apparent to the rest of us here in warmdry bus world. Like the woman who waddled on like a water-logged hen, nested right in front of me and shook her soaked plumage all over the young blonde to her left, cluck cluck clucking all the time about late and rain and Mondays and rain and late buses and Mondays.
Looking around … Oh, all of our best friends are here: Cyclops, Sleepy Indian Man, Mr. Shitshoe, Kitty Collar, Smoker Chica … and others.
"What happened to the first bus?" a particularly snappy man queries the driver as he comes aboard.
"Ah! Ha! I have no idea, good morning, Sir!" the driver cheerfully answers back, trying to bring sunshine to make up for the rain as much as he is picking up passengers for his predecessor.
Standing room only now. And still more than a couple of stops until the highway. ...Ah, so it's Monday. It's May. And here I sit, taking in the collective gloom as much as the curiosities that are the morning commute.

5/11 While waiting in line for the afternoon buses, I spied a sign: "Lost Fountain Pen on 17K made by Cross black with matte finish if found call Linda 555-5555 [not the real phone #]. So the 17K is made by cross black with a matte? Finish if found call Linda? …I spun iterations and iterations of word combinations of that unpunctuated sentence around in my head and amused myself for a good ten minutes. Doing so reminded me of one lunchtime my friends and I spent in the cafeteria in high school. There was a boy a couple of tables over whom we deemed “gross.” I can’t now even remember what it was that made him seem gross, whether a zitty face, B.O., corpulence, or a despicable disposition. It really doesn’t matter. As my two best friends and I sat together, one of us said, “YOU are so gross.” Then another followed with, “You ARE so gross.” Me with “You are SO gross” … “You are so GROSS!” … and we just continued on in a circle until we realized that each and none of the emphases could possibly do his grossness justice.

About a week later, my morning was marked by more direct confrontation ... oh what these saintly bus drivers have to put up with!

5/25
“Hey... Move it all ’dway back!” the driver yelled to the Russian judge putting his bike on the front rack of the bus.
"You different... Everybody's different..." Judge said, waving his hands about in absurd frustration.
"Yeah...up. Everybody's different," the driver concurred half-heartedly as though he fully grasped the deeper meaning.
“No, listen!” Judge vociferated again, leaning forward insistently. "You see, I am there, s'my bike, I can see, I the judge."
"Okay, okay, well good." Clearly, the driver just wanted Judge to take his seat.
And so he did. Clomping down the aisle, he mumbled away, "I da judge, I da judge." Yes, yes, sir you are.
Oh and by the way, she's in my line of smell again. That’s right, Smoker Chica. Grr-ruh!

And so most of my mornings continued much like those: mostly comforting in their monotony yet spruced up by little minor events of mankind.

So whether one is commuting or communing with the masses, toiling at a daily grind or grinding out miles on the road, I have found that the best way to keep my spirits up and myself focused and fancy-free is to delight in people’s quirks – though they sometimes may be smelly – find a theme-song and imagine everyday as an episode in life’s great soap opera.

Incidentally, Cyclops’ theme song – or at least his ring tone – is “Give me that fill-lay o’fish … give me that fish!” This cracks me up. What a happy guy! My 2010 theme song is “Soul Sister” because the way you cut a rug, watching you is the only drug I need … and I ain’t gonna miss a single thing you do- ooo- oooh … tonight!

As the Polygon Turns (Episode 27): Fancy That!

“No shorts and fancy shoes today?” Armyrock asked me when I got on the bus last Friday morning. He’s always wearing his digi-army cammies and as near as I can tell most of his features and physique look like an undefined boulder. To myself (and now to you, I guess), I refer to him as the Armyrock.

“Nah,” I answered him, grinning from ear to ear, “I did get my run in last night before it rained, though.”

That’s right, sports fans… a run! And not just any run: a back to nature, screw the accoutrements, walk in the woods, gotta be good, flight for freedom run – nothin’ between me and the trail but a thin slice of toe-covering rubber. Yup. Just me and my FiveFingers.

Back when I was running regularly, often the measure of accomplishment during my runs was standard, obvious stuff like my pace, my distance, whether I felt like I wanted to puke or not … sometimes it was simply if I felt better when I finished than when I started.

But now… now, I tell myself, in this next chapter of my quest to be healed for good, for all time … now, I just feel like, hey… did I make it? Am I “looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid”? Yeah, yeah, yeah…

I dream of the days when again I can, on a whim, escape the air conditioning and brain numbing of the Polygon and prance along the river when the summer sprinklers are on … the pleasure of the Potomac pelting my perspiring perspicacious person … when I can take the long cuts and forget where I am …

I might start keeping track of my time and my mileage again then too … maybe… maybe not… looking like a true survivor and feeling like a little kid is enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

So yeah, when I wear my new and nifty so-called “fancy shoes” coming to and from work, I feel like I am getting away with something… almost like the opposite of the Emperor’s New Clothes. My FiveFingers make me feel like I am wearing nothing (on my feet) and no one seems to notice. So then, I get to grinning… and the smirk, as it always seems to, gives me away…

But this smirk is different … different from the smirk I get when my hair blows back and away when I walk inside from the courtyard and feel like a model must feel, tossing her locks in the face of a high speed floor fan at a photo shoot (not sure if i actually tossle my head or if i manage to restrain myself just to smirking) … different from the smirk that strikes me when I see Lungerman deep knee-bending in the p-way … different from the smirk that strikes me when I have cheeks full of treats too many to swallow at once … different from the smirk that strikes me when I hear horrific releases of bodily gas in an adjacent stall... Yup. This smirk is different from all of those minor manifestations of mischeviousness.

For you see, in my FiveFingers, I am not only doing something that I want to that seems to defy all logic and definitely defies what my doctors have told me … it makes me feel better, from my feet to the street!

...wait, that's not very far. But it sounded neat!

Hey, by the way, have I told you about Lungerman? I don’t think so.

He’s the latest Polygon personality i've found that's truly a caricature in and of himself. He’s about 5’7-5’9” tall, somewhere between 48 and 58 years old… maybe I am being generous. He could be a youthful looking 68 and only 5'6"; he has white hair and a full white beard, is of average build -- but NOT what i'd call svelte -- and normally he wears earth tone shirts and ties well coordinated with similarly earth toned slacks, a belt and some pedio-friendly footwear. Now I am all about pedio-friendly footwear (duh?), but UNLIKE Lungerman, I take my stretching and exercise regimen to the gym. That’s right: he has a whole host of what look like physical therapy/rehab light stretching exercises that he chooses to perform in the hallway and on the steps adjacent to our office. So what if it is the end of a dead end hallway where no one would venture by accident? Come on, Dude! Deep knee bends, rhythmic breathing, lunges, side bends, toe lifts… do you need to do them on these steps? What’s your job, anyway? I mean the guy is out there so often and for so long, that just in my comings and goings to and from the upstairs offices, I have his whole routine down pat.

I don’t think that he is getting away with anything.

Maybe I should tip him off to my fancy shoes trick.

Burning Rubber

It's been a busy couple of weeks at the Polygon with world events. So busy, actually that I have found very little to mock apart from my usual inner monologue of epithets to people who cut me off, piss me off, or otherwise blow me off, but to whom I, heeding the sage advice of my wise father, just nod and smile sweetly.

Having been under the weather most of this past week, I worked from home, causing me to feel more in touch with my cavorting Boson Terriers and neighborhood wildlife than the goings on at the Polygon.

Down the street from us, there is an older man who owns a loud motorcycle. He took it out today just for a spin around the block – which is all of six tenths of a mile. Actually, I don’t know if that is only how far he went. Maybe he was just trying to get his sea legs, so to speak. All I know is that I heard him fire it up before I left the house and shortly thereafter when I was on the next street up, he came whipping around the bend. Funny it was to me. I chuckled to no one in particular.

It reminded me of an older gentleman who lived on my block when I was a kid. His name was Mr. Kramer, Henry Kramer, and he was always the gentleman dressed in tweed, politely inquiring about my mother and her flowers. Daily he walked a pair of Welsh corgi dogs. Over the years, the dogs got old and probably died, but the Kramers always seemed to have two corgis, never puppies, so it seemed; just two yappy dogs. Whenever my brother, sister or I would sell things door-to-door, for scouts or some sort of fund-raising, the Henry and Janice Kramer would only open their door a crack, so there was still a catenary in the chain that held the door to, safe from intruders. They’d conduct whatever business or conversations needed to be had in that rectangle of safe space. And that was the way it was.

Every so often, on warm, clear evenings with soft skies, Henry would cruise around on his mo-ped. Janice or the dogs or the tweed must have gotten a little too much for him and he had the need for speed. Around the block he’d go, and we kids would just watch in wonder. Mr. Kramer on his moped.

When people ask me where I grew up and I tell them New Jersey, the question that inevitably follows is, “Which exit?”

Fact is, I didn’t live anywhere near the NJ Turnpike or even the Garden State Parkway – which I think are the roads that the joke refers to.

Although my zip code said “Somerville,” I grew up in a little town called North Branch, named after the north branch of the Raritan River. There were 13 houses on our U-shaped block and across the street there were acres and acres of farmland. The farms there raised beef cattle and as far as I knew, grew no crops other than corn and hay.

Through these farms, though, there was a dirt road, blocked to cars but a public right-of-way nonetheless – my dad looked it up. This road – known to us kids on Village Way as ‘the dirt road’ – was our pathway to adventure. At one end of the dirt road was Burnt Mills Road, the road that closed the “U” of Village Way. After crossing Burt Mills Road, we could ride our bikes all up and down the dirt road, making jumps, kicking up dirt, never worrying about cars. Best of all, it connected to another road, called Vanderveer Avenue - named for one of the founders of the town and owners of one of the farms along the road (a boy who came to be my brother’s best friend ended up living there later on in our life, but not yet at the time about which I am writing)… where was I? Oh yeah, best of all Vanderveer Avenue dumped right out by the North Branch General Store. At the General Store, back in the ’80s, a dollar could buy a kid a lot of happiness.

This happiness was not cheaply purchased, however. We kids had to undergo a lot of trials and tests along the way to earning the cold soda, neco wafers, and licorice waiting for us at the end of the line.

The most fearsome obstacle was for us to pass the Sutton’s house unscathed. The Sutton’s house was the second one we came to, at the bottom of the really steep dirt hill that I was famous for wiping out on. Before we’d get to what we thought was the property line, we kids would stop our bikes and line up abreast across the road. Then, we’d lean forward with our foot on one pedal, the other on the ground. Hunched over our handlebars, we’d look left, look right, stare each other in the eyes, then launch and scream, “Burn Rubber!!!!”

We’d pedal, pedal, pedal as fast as our little legs could carry us, spurred on by snapping dogs – German shepherds, Dobermans, and the meanest junkyard dogs imaginable – straining at their chains, lurching towards our throats like we were trying to steal the Hope diamond.

As we got older and braver, some kids would bark back at the dogs. But deep down inside we were always fearful. The only way we could get through there and to the treats on the other side alive was to stick together and to BURN RUBB-BER!!!

As the Polygon Turns (Episode 26): Send-off

The send-off ceremony was held at a typical New England fairground that looked, well, typical, except that it was January. Corn dog and cotton candy booths buttoned up tight, as if to guard against the cold like their summer patrons would be; and where summer would have seen straw and livestock, we saw snow banks and snow drifts. In poetry, it’s called the pathetic fallacy – that nature commiserates with man, shares our joys and our sorrows in the form of weather, sunshine and rain. In this case it’s bitter, bitter cold. And snowing.

So it’s January and citizen-soldiers are being sent off, deploying away from their loved ones, families perhaps less used to long absences than, say, the regular or even the Reserve Forces. But somehow that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t make it any better on any one who has to give someone up today.

Inside the exposition center: nearly a thousand people – soldiers and families – comingle on the vast cement floor. Many rows of chairs face each other, askew from the stage that’s dressed in its finest red, white and blue. Looking at the crowd from above, the soldiers in their combat camouflage stand out like chocolate chips would in cookie batter. They are dispersed amongst their families just as our National Guardsmen spend most of their days, citizens first and most often, soldiers second but always truly.

These are no “weekend warriors.” These are patriots all, dedicated men and women who keep down “real” jobs and, since early on in these wars, have augmented our Active Duty and Reserve Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq so America’s military can continue the luxury of an all-volunteer force; so America doesn’t need a draft. Something to think about…

As the time for the ceremony draws near, families hold hands tighter, hug more often, and find it harder to hold back tears. Two minutes before 0930, the camouflage coalesces in the center, between the askew chairs, facing the leaders – statesmen, generals and an admiral. The soldier-citizens are upright, their families downcast, our leaders optimistic.

They deliver speeches about duty, sacrifice, and support. How the soldiers know the mission and never really worry about the mission. The leaders know that the stoic soldiers worry only about their families. Every thing they do, they do for the ones they love.

When the ceremony is over, the soldiers file out, to do their duty… for their families, for their country, and for whatever else I imagine they may believe in. The space they vacate leaves the askew families facing only each other.

They must be sad, I think. Obviously they are sad. It starts snowing harder.

I wish I could let them know that their heroes are doing what they love for the ones they love. I wonder if it would make a difference. It might. The snow may let up soon. When the soldiers return it will be another winter of another year. It will be snowing then, again.