Life, Death and the Passage of Time? in Everyday Ramblings

This is the view from the bus stop I wait at on my way home from grocery shopping. I have the same shot from last week in the pouring rain, and the week before that I did not take a shot of the actual bus stop where the county coroner’s office was loading a black body bag onto a stretcher. Someone, sadly, died at the bus stop.

One assumes it was a drug overdose, but one does not know. It was 10 AM on a sunny Friday with a row of stalls to vacuum one’s car at the car wash which is behind the bus stop. It is one of the reasons I choose that stop. There are always people nearby.

Yesterday I read an article about a study that shows traces of both methamphetamine and fentanyl both in the air and on surfaces on our buses, streetcars, and light rail. Boy, if I wasn’t already wearing a mask on public transportation that would be a good reminder to do so. It is the drivers with constant exposure that one worries about. But fentanyl is crazy dangerous.

I take the bus to get over to hang out with the coffee guys through the core downtown area and it is not a happy healthy place. There is always something going on that visibly demonstrates the ravages of mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. So much suffering.

This week we had a new guy join our group, a musician, recently specializing in sea shanties, who moved here as so many people do to be near a grandchild. A baby girl just born after they got here. From Santa Cruz. The one in California.

We spent most of our time together talking to the artist who recently finished a ten-year project illustrating in a loose way a text of 100 spiritual aphorisms in a South Indian language. A couple of the guys had gone up with him to see the show in Washington that he hung last month. This is Vendanta, one of the schools of Hindu Philosophy. There was a guru here when a number of these guys were young. Walt, in his amazing actorly way, can recite a number of the verses in the original. Walt, who knows the whole text of King Lear by heart.

One of the guys brought his girlfriend. They are both in their 70’s so girlfriend seems to be a bit of a misnomer, but you get the idea. The woman he hangs out with. I had met her on a Zoom meeting recently. She seems nice but I know little about her except that she wears hearing aids, likes unusual books, and lives in a nice little AUD surrounded by cypress trees. If she is an artist of some sort, I don’t know what that is. He is very competitive and judgmental and funny and a gifted guitar player who had a son in his thirties that he adores.

I misplaced a word when I was sharing something, as one does. I used the word plastic because in the moment I couldn’t remember the word I was looking for. I was talking about how the brain adapts. He interrupted me and said only Barbie has a plastic brain, in humans we have neuroplasticity. I think he kind of meant it as a joke. He tells a lot of jokes. But it annoyed me no end. Enough to mention it in my weight training class later in the day. Enough to mention it here.

It is like my relationship with Mr. Finch. I got so much out of it, rich and intellectually so deep but it was also unbelievably challenging. Hanging out with these guys is not easy. I am not complaining. It is worth it, the bus ride through the dicey parts of town, the social anxiety that plagues me before, during and after. I get hours and hours of things to contemplate and consider for my trouble.

And a richness to the fabric of my days mostly preoccupied by what I am teaching, my students, my family, Carlo.

Speaking of family…today is Miss E.’s 23rd birthday! How the heck did that happen. I remember so clearly sitting in a coffee shop with Mr. Finch talking about my anxieties and concerns in going to be with my family on her first birthday.

We were not allowed to bring anything in pastel colors. No girl things specifically either. And now she is living in a tiny apartment in Harlem with her cat and boyfriend working in the Italian department at NYU and avoiding going to graduate school much to her mother’s (my niece) dismay.

And I will be texting my best wishes.