Riding the Bus

I like riding the bus to work for a lot of reasons. I can sit and stare off into space and ignore everything. I can watch people. I can listen. Sometime I should take a microphone with me on the bus. The sounds are the best part of the ride.

Today, there were two men sitting behind me speaking beautiful Spanish. If I had to guess I would say one was from Spain and the other from Latin America. The one that I imagine is from Spain looks like a professional soccer player to me. He is tall, with very dark hair and eyes, and he has a 5 o'clock shadow at 8:00am. He appears to be very fit. Also he often wears soccer jerseys, which helps the image. The other fellow is shorter with broad shoulders and nose, and has a similar shadow to his face. He has the legs of a soccer player, but not the jersey. He seems to pronounce his "s" sound differently too. Still in a clear elegant fashion, but not with the "th" hint that speakers from Spain and southern France have. As they spoke it seemed as if they were singing a secret to one another. A whispered melody, kept secret by my ignorance of their vocabulary.

Their's was not the only song I heard today. In back of the bus a black man was recounting some exciting news to a friend. I couldn't hear his content but I recognized the tune. It was spiritual. Had the words been foreign I would have thought he was singing. His cadence started low and landed with emphasis on the punctuation of his sentence. Each time he arrived at the same tone. I was staring off out the window when I first heard it and I honestly thought someone was singing. Then I realized what it was and I was more delighted than if it had been a song.

There are other sounds too. Like the relieved report of the rear door when it opens for someone getting off the bus after a long day at an awful job. There is a humble groan to the hydraulics when they kneel to accommodate a man in a wheelchair or to ease old knees out of the coach. I like the bus for all these sounds and for a dozen more.

Morninging

You may be wondering why I don't blog so much anymore, or you may not. Events of the last weekend make me think that there are some of you out there that actually read my blog, which I find entirely shocking. Let's just look at the reasons that this blog is not crankin out blather as regularly as it could be.

Setting: It's early a bit after 5:00am. The floor in my kitchen is cold and there is practically no light peaking in the large window overlooking my kitchen table. The coffee pot can be heard gurgling. It smells good. AM 580 is whispering NPR in the background, probably something about why the war sucks, or why eating organic food is good. (I find this comforting.)

After stumbling around to make the coffee, I fire up my, now aging Mac laptop. I click on Cap's blog, Brant's blog and anything that looks interesting on my News-Gazette and BBC news RSS feeds. Usually by the time that I've read what these sources have to say I realize that I have nothing creative or insightful to offer you, my blog reader.

So, as you can see, as with most things... It's not my fault.