Riding a bus

Since I arrived in the Trumansburg-Ithaca area my car has been parked (save for the first ill advised morning I drove to Ithaca which was not unlike clawing my way up a severely compacted colon).

I like my car that way. (It's ok, Daddy)

Here, there is enough public transportation that I can take the bus to get to work in the morning.  I ride my Snow Bike the 0.8 miles in a few minutes of spikey, awaking, unabashed cold to the bus stop. There I stamp around feeling numb and then rejoice (oh! how something so quotidian can cause such unbridled joy) as the bus curves its way into view.  My bike rides on the nose of the bus as a sort of mistaken bizarre emblem, and I settle on the inside and open my book.

While it takes longer to ride the bus than to drive there in my car, I think of it as intentional scheduled reading time, and for me it is free thanks to a Cornell-sponsored bus-pass.

This bus population seems different than that in other cities, where buses are mainly for those in economical straights; here there is eaves-dropping on conversations about fly-fishing, hiking, video games. There seems to be a veritable bus-riding group of friends taking over the whole back section. It's a rather comfortable feeling in there, the buzz and hum of conversation rather than the lonely silence I'm accustomed to on buses.

And on a bus you can turn to your seat-mate--both of you reading books, both of you with travel mugs of coffee--and ask him if he just might happen to know what a "dirigible" is. Because you're reading Bill Bryson (with his penchant for great words), and you don't have a smartphone, and so you and your seat-mate relish the strange sound of this word and he shares how only just last week the cartoon his children were watching used that word, dirigible. What a splendid coincidence.

The two of you chat in between page-turns. "So you're the die-hard" he comments, voicing what is probably the collective curiosity of the bus about who was the one responsible for that single frigid bike up front.

So now you have a bus friend. His name is Pete.

Much harder to do in a car.