Southfield Michigan is very hot in July

You know those movies and TV shows with survivors struggling in a dystopiac futre a toxic lifeless landscape with all the resources pillaged out of it? It's not the future. That's where homeless mentally ill folk live today.

Earlier this month, I spent a couple hours near Detroit in hundred-degree heat with a wreatched delusional guy. At first I was scared of him because he was raging and yelling and throwing his backpacks around. But then he apologized to me because he saw that I was worried. He explained his situation in terms he could understand. I don't think his explanations matched what I would call reality, but I think they matched his feelings. He was telling me he felt like someone whose wife had been in a car accident and similar intense events.

To summarize this sad situation briefly, temporarily-mentally-stable people kept arguing with him that his perceptions didn't make sense. In particular, bus drivers rejected the damp, rumpled piece of paper the man held out which represented a bus ticket. It might have been an expired bus ticket, or maybe it was something else entirely. Not only was the man thought-disordered, but I suspect he couldn't read. I didn't think the drivers should necessarily give him a ride without a ticket and invite trouble onto their buses, but his guy really needed help. 

I think he was dehydrated and exhausted and I would guess out of anti-psychotic medication. Other people were being mean to him but his delusions were worse for him than for the rest of us, I'm sure. If only there was a bus that just drove around and picked up wretched mentally ill people (the driver could be in a safely-screened-off area and took them to a cooling shelter and a nurse could draw blood and see what medicine they're supposed to be on and give them relief from the scrambled neightmare perceptions. I understand their life problems are huge and nearly-impossible to fix. But there's no reason for humans to suffer in this rich nation.

When I left the Southfield Greyhound station, the poor guy had calmed down (I think it helped that I gave him cautious sympathy from a distance) and he was resting in semi-shade in the grass under a tree. He'd asked to use my cell phone and I'd had to refuse because I feared he might throw it in frustration if someone hung up on him or something like that. I was traveling by myself and couldn't risk not having my phone. But I did give him my supply of Doritos and pretzels. He said "God bless you," and I said "God bless you."

Only in Maine

Maine has pine trees, marriage equality, medical marijuana, a lot of hiking trails, people who work outside, moose, and many, many skunks. I have only lived here five years and I have had to bathe a dog who got squirted in the face, AND had a skunk spray so close to two different houses that the whole place smelled (for two or three days) exactly as though we'd piled a bushel of rotten heads of garlic inside an old truck tire on the kitchen floor and set fire to the whole thing.

So one gets a whiff a skunk in enclosed places sometimes. Skunks freak out if they get stuck in a garage, under a back deck, if you encounter them while hunting moose or hiking a trail or going out to your pickup truck in the parking lot at the kerosene delivery place. We all try to wash the scent off an expensive or useful coat or pair of boots, and sometimes it didn't quite work. The oily odor permeates everything, so even if the skunk did its thing in your garage, it's likely your flannel shirts in the bedroom closet smell like they were sprayed with Eau de Pepe LePew.

So I got on the bus today and got whammed with a strong skunky aroma and tried not to look around to see who the offender was. It's been me in the past; I know how it is when you go inside somewhere and people sniff and wrinkle their noses.

Then I realized what I was smelling was skunk. . .weed. The bus to my house is also the bus to the community college.

Mad Mountain Goat on the Big Rock Candy Montain

Slippery slope I climbed to get to the median strip near a turn lane.

Here in wintery Maine, it's normal to teeter on a four-foot-tall ridge of plowed-up snow while waiting for the METRO bus. I've gotten better with each winter here, as each is always an -- ahem -- opportunity to gain practical experience. If I'm careful, I can safely clamber up to the top of the ridge, and then stay there. The first thing I learned, when I moved to Maine, was to wear waterproof shoes with rugged ridged soles.You wear sneakers or dress shoes here in the winter, you die.

So I'm good until the bus pulls up, and then I have to somehow maneuver myself from the spiny ridge of the mini glacier down to street level. No amount of experience or practice helps with that part of the process. 

From the window of a passing car, the A-shaped snow slope doesn't look like a big deal. But when one is right there, there's no escaping the observation that the mini mountain range is not just deep snow to punch through in boots or good shoes and wool socks. It's actually a hard awkward hump of icy snow deceptively layered with a foot of fluffy snow. Up close, the downslope to the roadway is intimidating. 

On the sidewalk side, the snow is pretty and clean and fluffy. Mini snowblowers that look like riding lawnmowers, go along the sidewalks, and they scoop up the snow and then snort it out of a vent pipe which piles it up neatly along the edge of the sidewalk. 

On the street side, the dark gray-and-black side snow is mixed with gravel and sand and clumps of salt and ice balls and stiffened dirty mittens and small pieces of rusty tailpipe. This is all frozen together with a shiny slippery glaze of road salt brine. It's hard as stone, and no amount of kicking or stomping will make the slightest dent in the surface.

On a trip on the other side of the Casco Bay Bridge, in Portland proper, I was poised at the top of one of these snow-ice hills. Careful scanning showed me that the only potential foothold, near the bottom of the slope, was an enormous bootprint. It was much too large to be human. But then it couldn't have been made by Bigfoot because big furry creatures don't wear soled footwear. But if sasquatches did wear boots, this particular humanoid would have been wearing galoshes two sizes two big for its paws. The crater of a bootprint was certainly large enough for me to get my own Doc Marten shoe into, but then, while traveling down on a slippery slope, could I get my shoe back up out of there? Hmm.

There was no give to the edges of this deep crater, frozen like plaster or stone now, after having been stomped down while the snow mix was still new and soft. Above the bootprint, halfway up the slope, was a sort of ledge, only about three inches wide and perhaps ten inches long. Not as long as my shoe, for sure. 

This sort-of ledge, shallow and uneven, had a chunk of snow lying on it. I carefully leaned forward a bit and kicked the snow chunk away with the toe of my shoe. Then I tried to talk myself into the idea that I could wedge the side of my right shoe into the inadequate dent above the semi-ledge. If I aligned my right shoe just right, maybe I could drop my left foot into the big huge frozen footprint crater. Then what would happen? I knew what would happen. My mind filled with images of myself, three weeks into the future, at a physical-therapy clinc, using my just-surgically-rebuilt knee to pedal an exercise bike.

Okay, no. Time for another approach to getting down to street level so I could get onto the METRO bus. I clambered back down the fluffy clean slushy snow of the sidewalk side of the four-foot-ice hill. I had to get off the sidewalk as soon as possible as it was coated with a layer of water on top of clear ice. I picked my way along the surface of death till I came to a driveway where I could move over into the road. 

It says something when one is safer sharing the asphalt with rapidly-moving traffic than if one is using the theoretically-cleared pedestrian walkway. As I walked, I kept close to the curb and chanted my usual walking-in-the-road mantra, which goes "Don't hit me with your car, I'm sosmeone's mother, don't hit me with your car." I got through this chant about six or seven times and then i was at the bus stop sign.

The metal pole which held the sign was buried in dirty snow. The heap of snow and ice chunks formed a pyramid all around the sign so there was no spot anyone would stand at the bus stop unless one had a person-sized gyroscope they could fit into, or maybe stilts with plumber's helpers at the ends. I looked around for a place that I could stand near enough to the sign to be recognized as someone who wanted to ride the Forest Avenue METRO bus while also remaining far enough back from the street that I wouldn't be wiped out by a heating-oil tanker truck.

[Happily for you,Rreader, this is where the notes for this blog post end. I never got revved up into full rant mode. I remember that the bus finally came and the driver yelled at me for standing in the wrong place. Then when i got on the bus, we had an argument so unpleasant that I ended up writing a scathing letter to the METRO office. I did that instead of finishing this harrowing tale. Better to tell the bus people what the issues were than to yammer on at length here. I can see from where I started this Blogger entry that I made the notes for this post almost exactly a year ago. I can report -- based on bus trips taken last Wednesday and Thursday -- that the struggle to get from the bus stop to the actual door of the bus is exactly the same as it was twelve months ago. However, was taking local buses here in South Portland. I had much more friendly and helpful drivers this time, so score one for the South Portland Bus Service vs. the Portland METRO.]

 

It Always Went Bad When We Got to the Pizza Hut Corner

For about fifteen years, during my first marriage, I traveled to and from the grocery store as a passenger in a car. First in a compact car which groaned alarmingly when we made a right turn, then in a station wagon with a backseat full of younguns, then in a sedan with more people and dogs than we had room for. 

After my divorce, I did my shopping by getting on the city bus conveniently located in the same block as my apartment and rode to Kroger. I was grateful to live so close to the bus stop, even if I was woken each morning by the 6 a.m. motor coach roaring "Number Four, Indianola Avenue!" with its volume set at "Spinal Tap" level, 11-out-of-10 volume. 

I remained grateful and accepting that the bus went from my block to the grocery store as long as I timed things right for my twice-a-month grocery outings. The north-south bus route that went up and down the avenue had an alternating schedule and it had some gaps in it. Every other bus went to the grocery store, and there were time periods where the Weber Road #83 didn't come along for a while. If they'd been on a regular hourly schedule, I could have kept track of the fact that the 1 pm, 3 pm, and 5 pm buses went to Kroger while the 2 pm and 4 pm did not. Alas, there were complexities.

I had a printed schedule to tell me when to leave my house, and I could also get bus times by calling a recording on my cell phone. I was pretty good at leaving the house at the right time. But I sometimes found it hard to keep track of which bus I needed to take home once I had shopped. Honestly, it was hard to know going to go south on Indianola Avenue and which one wasn't.  Why this was so important will be explained later.

Even once I'd actually gotten on the #83 headed towards home, I wasn't sure what was going to happen when the bus got to my street. There were printed schedules in holders behind the driver, but they were never for the bus I was on. I assume this was encourage city bus tourism. ("If you like the Number 83, you may also enjoy Routes 7, 17, and 92!")

On some COTA routes, one could ask the driver about where a particular bus did or didn't go. The hippie guy who drove the Route 4 North was always great, answering any question I had. But most of the drivers who drove the #83 Weber Road route were the kind of bus drivers who hate you for even getting lnto their bus to begin with. 

Why were the Weber Road route drivers so cranky? I think it was the Pizza Hut issue. Maybe also the hospital loop issue, now that I think of it. It was probably the combination of the two problems together. 

The problem with the Pizza Hut corner was that the intersection of North Broadway and High Street was just cra-a-a-zy. Over the years, many schemes had been hatched to fix the issues, but the issues remained. 

You couldn't turn left on High Street but everyone wanted to. People impulsively did so without warning. Additionally, people could and did legally zoom south along the curb lane on High, then do an abrupt diagonal slam into the turn lane, followed by a NASCAR type slide around the front bumper of whatever vehicle was poking out into the intersection in the hope of making an illegal left turn. 

On top of that, North Broadway goes down to the river and near High Street the slope is practically vertical. On the west side of Broadway, people in junker cars whose engines didn't idle evenly tended to ram right through even when the light turned red because they were afraid their cars would stall out and they'll roll backwards and run into the person behind them, and of course then they'd have to lock themselves into their car long enough to make a speedy cellphone call The General to get instant insurance coverage before the cops came. 

The intersection was so crazy. . .

How crazy was it?

. . .the elementary school had constructed an entire underground tunnel system to let children reach the other side of High Street. 

So this is the street corner which stressed out the bus drivers and made them mad at us. Most of us passengers wanted to get off next to the Pizza Hut, because that's where the north-south #2 bus stopped. Due to intersection insanity, the bus was not allowed to let people off at the Pizza Hut; the law or the bus company or sometbody who decided things had decreed that people had to get off across High Street, next to the Kroger parking lot. 

Nobody wanted to be taken across High Street, because the bus we needed would surely shoot by while we furiously hopped up and down like Yosemite Sam on the opposite curb. If we were in danger of being late to work, we'd have to chance jaywalking while praying we'd get safely to the Pizza Hut without being flattened by cars in turn lanes going every which way. 

A rare few of the Weber Road route drivers showed mercy and illegally opened the front doors of the bus for just a second to let us escape. They'd pretend they were adjusting the door to "close it better" and they'd look away for the 45 seconds it was open. The effect was like someone opening a screen door for a bird that's gotten trapped on a sun porch and has been beating its wings against the mesh screen. We escapees said nothing and we didn't look back. We just zoomed out the folded-back accordion door and we were gone. 

But most of the drivers wouldn't break the rule and furthermore, they were sick of us begging to be let out as we saw our northbound connection steaming up the hill toward the hearing-aid store."Driver! There's my bus! Can I get out here? Please, let me out here!"

And then, after the bus driver dropped off angry or forlorn passengers at the reviled Kroger lot stop several times a day, each COTA driver had to take the bus around the loop near the visitors' entrance at Riverside Hospital. More frustration all around. 

There were two bus stops at the hospital, and the first one was fine. That one was used by workers -- mostly nursing aides and custodial staff -- and these people were regular riders. Totally familiar with where they were within the hospital complex, of course. But the second hospital stop was used by people coming to Riverside for the first time to visit someone, and these passengers were worn out, having usually already taken one or two buses before they ever got on the #83. By the time the hospital bus got to the turnaround loop near the revolving door, the first-time riders were all turned around in their choice of doorways. It was like that moment in the Harry Potter movie when the newbie witches and wizards have to find out how and where to take the train to Hogwarts. 

The visitors were also stressed out because they knew they had to hurry up. They had about forty-five minutes to get in and see their Grandma, and then they had to scurry back to catch the first of three buses going the other way so they could be at work at KFC when their 5 to 8 pm workshift started. 

So they didn't know where to get off the bus, or what door to use, or how to find the return bus again. And this made the cranky #83 drivers even crankier. They didn't understand how we could all be so clueless. They, the drivers, knew every sealed crack in the asphalt parking lot at the Hospital and yet we, the foolish riders, didn't seem to know to go through a door clearly marked VISITORS.

  The double whammy of the Pizza Hut corner and the hospital entrance muddle set up the eternal battle of #83 driver versus #83 passenger. The drivers who took me east on North Broadway from Kroger toward indianola Avenue were already mad at me for being a human and being on their bus. So though I was unsure about whether this bus was going to bring me and my foodstuffs home, I didn't dare ask if this particular Weber Road bus was the one that turned right on Indianola. 

Sometimes, as a regular mass transit rider, you can tell from what the bus does that you are about to go where you don't want to g. You can pull the bell cord and hope your transfer is still good. But there was no way to tell on the Weber Road route that things had gone wonky until the bus didn't make the turn. If the bus didn't make the turn, I still had one chance to save myself -- if the light was red. The four-way stop had a traffic light where indianola went across, and there was an official stop half a block back. Drivers were only supposed to open the door at the stop, but even rule-enforcing drivers would let you off at the corner if the traffic light was red. 

If the driver  let me off at the red light, it was an imperfect solution as I was several blocks north of where I lived. It was a hassle to carry my groceries all the way south from East North Broadway down to my block, the one where the old movie theater was, but it was do-able.

 However, if the light was green, and the bus didn't turn onto Indianola, then I was doomed, because the next place the bus stopped was on the moon. The Weber Road bus hijacked me along the north edge of the Park-and-Ride super-duper parking lot, then down the sloped, patched pavement that goes under the dim, heavily-graffiti'd railroad underpass long enough to support multiple sets of train tracks, and then past a long grassy vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, past Panic Lighting (appropriately named as by this time I was indeed panicking, and THEN to Silver Drive, the access road running parallel to the &^$*@%! highway.  

My best option, from Lunar Base III, was to haul myself and my stuff south along the burm of the access road, and then if I made it, turn at Weber Road, stagger uphill and over the railroad tracks, then go up the alley and then up the other alley to my apartment building. I couldn't just go back the way the bus had brought me. Turning around to go back up the slope under the railroad underpass would mean a really, really long walk with right angles around fenced-off areas. 

So, when dumped out near the highway, I took a few minutes to distribute the weight of the groceries so I wouldn't be pulled down on one side by five pounds of red potatoes and four cans of Progresso soup.Then
I tied the handles of the grocery bags together more tightly and set off, trying to cheer myself by noticing that it was not raining, hailing, or snowing.

Added to my joy of living on one memorable day, I was wearing the wrong jeans. If I'd known I was going to get off a bus with two heavy bundles of canned goods In the Middle of Nowhere, I would have made another fashion choice. 

In the previous few months, stress had caused me to drop about twenty pounds. My blue jeans had become too big. I hadn't had time to go find better-fitting ones at Goodwill. Instead, I was notching my belt at the innermost hole to cinch my pants up. 

This is the point in my sorry tale in which I share the less-than-fascinating fact that one of my legs is about two inches longer than the other one. This little quirk causes my distinctive walk ("I looked out the car window and I knew it was you!") in which I slightly swing my right foot out in a small arc with each step on that side. Otherwise, the ball of my foot would bump into the ground as I stepped forward with my right leg. (If you've ever worn two different shoes with different heel heights, that's my life.) 

Normally this isn't a huge deal, but oddly, it's a major issue with finding pants which really fit. The leg-swing causes me to walk with a slight twisting motion like the agitator in a washing machine. This tends to drive the waistband of my pants down my torso. In daily life, it's a minor issue. When I walk from the car in the parking lot of a store or a restaurant, I stop right before we go in and I do a quick waistband alignment which makes me look less like someone who slept in her clothing the night before. 

Well, on the awful day that the bus overshot my street and I had to get off near the highway, I found that my usual walk, plus the too-loose pants and the interaction of my jacket hem and my jeans waistband, aided by the pull of the grocery bags at the ends of my arms, accelerated the twisted waistband isue.  This meant I had to stop about every hundred feet. I'd put down the grocery bundles, yank my belt up, pick up the bags and walk another hundred feet. Not many people drove along the access road, which was good since the burm disappeared in places where the grassy slopes were steep and I had to walk along the edge of the pavement. But I'm sure I was visible to dozens of drivers going toward downtown on I-71. If I'd had posterboard and a Sharpie in my Kroger bags, i would have made a sign that said 

                                 NOT HOMELESS
                                     JEANS TOO BIG + MISSED MY BUS STOP.

The worst part about the ordeal, really, was after I clambered over two sets of bumpy railroad tracks at the Weber Road crossing and made it up the alleys to my house. I put the grocery bags down inside the front entrance and went into the bathroom. I flicked on the light and saw myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. It was hard to look at myself. I looked totally exhausted, somewhat humiliated, and more than slightly crazed. My eyes suggested a combination of Aileen Wuornos having a bad day, Patty Duke as pill-addled Neely O'Hara talking to herself, and Susan Hayward as faded star Helen Lawson, gazing into a hall mirror as she realizes that youth and beauty are everything.

[By the way, if you're wondering why I didn't just spring for a taxi home from the grocery store once a month, the answer is that cabs wouldn't come to my neighborhood. There was no Uber or Lyft then and the drivers needed to make big money. All the empty cabs were idling along the curb, way off at the airport, in the hope of getting a $50+ fare. No one in a Yellow Cab was going to risk their spot in the  queue just to drive miles and miles west to Kroger on High Street and take me home for ten bucks.]

Having had this overshooting-the-stop experience once, I tried not to have it happen again. But I struggled alone. The bus drivers felt that I should know what time each bus that turned south on my street. But I had a lot of complex details to arrange. First, I had to plan the route so I only had to pay the fare once. My wicker bill basket always held a tidy stack of unpaid or partially-paid bills , envelopes covered with notations like "Paid $25. Pay $15 more on Friday." Or "One month past due. Must pay previous amount by the 13th. Call office?" So I squeezed every nickel and counted out pennies to drop into the fare box.

Two different bus lines went up and down my street. One of them went all the time and one went now and then. The one that went all the time was the Number 4. If I caught the 4 North, I could ride it to the corner of Morse and High, then use a free transfer to jump onto a Number 2 South on High Street and hop off at the public library, which had a great sculpture of an open book along the walkway to the entrance. 

If I had good luck, i could drop off the books I'd read, pick up my reserves, and dash back to High Street to take another  Number 2 South the rest of the way to Kroger. Each bus transfer stayed valid for two hours, so if the Bus Gods were with me, I could shop at Kroger for 45 minutes or so and deftly use my heavily-inked and bent transfer to get on a #83 home. One trip, one fare.

If I remember right, the correct #83 Weber Road bus took me up the street to my apartment if I caught it at the North Brodway stop at 3:17 or something close to that, and not again till maybe 5:45. I tried hard to remember that, but by the time I had hauled myself on and off three buses and picked up my library books, I still had to run around and shop quickly while choosing carefully. It was necessary to balance out the both the cost and the physical weight of my groceries. Cheap food is heavy food -- sacks of potatoes, big bags of rice, canned soup on sale three for a dollar. So I had to get as much as I could carry, but not more than I could carry.

The return bus from Kroger, even when it was the magic lucky bus which let me off near the dry cleaners across the street from my house, still had to be caught at the stop on the other side of North Broadway. 

The exit of the grocery store was catty-corner at the exact opposite end of the huge parking lot from where I needed to be. The parking lot was large, as steep as an Alpine slope and nearly as icy and treacherous as the Alps in he wintry months. 

Therefore, as I shopped, I had to keep looking into my cart, trying to decide if I was both getting top value for my very limited grocery-budget dollar and purchasing items I had a realistic chance of hauling uphill across the nearly-endless expanse of the Kroger lot and then across the crosswalk and then back down the sidewalk and over the hellstrip to the shelter.

Also, I I had to have bags that were well-managed and within my control so I could put them up on the bench or hold them till the bus came. That particular bus shelter was gross. Smoking and spilling were two of the least objectionable things bus passengers did at the ol' eastbound #83 stop.

During each grocery haul adventure, I was an off-hours bus rider. I was too busy to ride at peak commuter hours. First thing in the morning, I was at my old house, helping my daughter get ready for school. And then in the evenings, I worked, starting around dinnertime. So I did my bus traveling in mid-day. Mornings and evenings, the bus was crowded with commuters, all with earphones or books to distract them from the hubbub.The atmosphere was fairly calm, if unfriendly, but each bus was jammed with people who all wished the other people weren't on the bus with them. These people all had day jobs.

When I rode the bus during the day, my fellow travelers were almost always poor people. Some of them were on their way to social work, psychiatric, or medical appointments. Some were on their way to the food pantry, or to score some pills from a friend, or to look around for people causing trouble so they could join in. Some were going to the public library to spend the whole day reading books about the Civil War. And some were lonely or scared, or their houses were unheated, or they had no house, and they stayed on the bus as long as the driver would tolerate that.

Each big bus would seat 50 or 60 people, maybe more, but there were usually 5 or 6 people on the bus during the day. The bus company pretended they didn't know why ridership was so low. Through this ruse, they got grant money to install large blinking digital displays and efficiency time check GPS things to document that the bus was on time. Or would have been on time if it hadn't broken down on North Fourth across from the old Wonder Bread factory. At least we knew how late we were. 

The main reason I disliked the bus was not among the ones that kept away most potential riders. The buses were semi-dirty, often late, and filled with weirdos. But hey, I rode the Indiana Avenue bus into downtown Indianapolis circa 1972. Indiana Avenue was so rough. . .

How rough was it? . . .

. . . the legislature considered changing the street name because it reflected so badly on the entire Hoosier State. 

Once, a rock came flying through a window, scattering shards of glass onto some empty seats and the aisle. The bus driver said "Anyone hit?" and when we said no, the bus kept going.

Another time, the driver had someone in the back row shake a wino to wake him up and the man turned out to be not asleep, but dead. 

So these little issues with people in Columbus, Ohio telling me they wore a Walkman to drown out the voices they heard? Like riding in a %&$*%!# horse-drawn carriage with the Queen of England. 

So noise, dirt, craziness -- not really a problem for me. What I personally hated about taking the bus (besides being yelled at by mean drivers) was all the feelings I had while sitting on a bus bench and watching one rich person at a time, alone in a large car, drive right by me. The comfortable middle class drivers weren't bothering me or sneering at me; they didn't see me at all. But I saw them. In particular, I watched affluent young people, in Land Rovers outfitted with custom Eddie Bauer leather upholstery, whizzing along East North Broadway.



They'd driven east from the Henderson Road area and they held the steering wheel casually while they sipped from plastic Starbucks cups filled with $6 lattes. Just before they got near the bus shelter, they swerved without signaling into the left turn lane to go north on High Street. 

Off they went. Going shopping, going to hang out in someone's rec room, going to score pills from a better class of friend than the daytime bus riders' friends, or perhaps going to attend one afternoon class, say Marketing 202b, at a small local college. They never gave a thought to schedules or the expiration time on the back of a bus transfer. If any of these young people had gone to public school, then perhaps they'd ridden on a COTA bus once, during a field trip to the science museum when they wer ein fourth grade.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing like sitting on a metal bench when it's hot or cold, in a dirty outdoor bus shelter with smeary windows, to make one aware of class difference. I'd never really wanted to be rich, never wished I lived in a comfortable split-level with a large television in every room and full surround sound throughout the house. Honestly, I could look at a house that cost $450,000 and compare it to where I lived 00 in a two-bedroom dump with an old wooden stockade fence that was falling over-- and I liked my dump better.

But sitting in the hot sun or the cold wind, watching people, clean and comfortable, sipping coffee drinks that cost more than my food budget for the entire day, was supposed to make me feel "I wish I was them," and it did make me feel that. Wait, but no! I didn't wish I was them; I wished I had their stuff and their comforts. 

And right there we come to class war. Why does anone need to fund more studies on social unrest? It's not just that the haves have while I, as a have-not, don't. It's that the haves don't stay home and enjoy all the groovy stuff. It's not the stuff they want; its the chance to gather with other haves and compare and see what they might need to upgrade, and then it's the added joy of parading it in front of people who don't have the groovy stuff and will never have it.

I'll tell you what else -- driving around all day, buying things and showing them off to the poor people -- keeps one from thinking about what money does to people's lives. But sitting on a bus bench? It gives one time to think. Also the chance to commune with others in the same circumstance. Or not really the same circumstance, just the same method of coping.

On the bus, I met people who'd just been hit by the economic downturn. They were sure they'd get a job soon, get their vehicle repaired, and climb back up into the lwoer middle class. I met people who were caught in social work whirligigs, where they rode a bus from office to office to office, bringing one piece of paper to Office A from Office B, then going back with anothe form from Office B to Office A. Office A would have no record of the original form and the person would be going back to get a new copy. I met people who started drinking at 8 a.m. or maybe they never stopped drinking the night before. They would chuckle and taunt the police officers driving by, as they'd hidden the liquor bottle over by the trash can and the drunkard was sitting legally inside the bus shelter and the cop could do nada.

Everybody was getting by. Everybody was going where they needed to go. And so was I. 

These days, I am married again, and we drive to the grocery store (the cut-rate grocery, of course) in a car. But a handful of times I've carried three or four plastic grocery sacks from the store to our house, and the street's plenty uphill on the way back, believe me. Yet I've felt peaceful, if a bit fatigued, when I got home. 

And that's because everyone in Maine is old and poor. It's not just that there's no one to envy, but rather that there's no shame in being working class or even the next economic level down from working class. We have trees here, and lots of potatoes, and church rummage sales with perfectly good winter coats for $2 or whatever you've got in your pocket. That makes all the difference; it really does.  

*****

In the photo below, North Broadway is the road the bus is on and High Street is the one going across the intersection near the top of the picture.  A is where people want to get off the bus when going west on North Broadway. The former Pizza Hut is now a Starbuck's, of course. B marks where the people who can't get off the bus at A have to get off instead, and then they must run back to A, and try and cross the street without dying in the multiplexity of turn lanes. And C is the spot where one lugs their fourteen separagteKroger plastic shopping bags if one want to take them home. Smart bus commuters tie the handles of the bags together; otherwise tomatoes and cans of soup escape and roll down the center aisle of the bus toward the driver, as the hill is very steep at point C. 

I Know Why The Sheltered Bench Stinks, or Talking To Drunk People at the Bus Stop in the Morning

Besides kickball, there were a lot of games the neighbor kids and I used to play where we could stand in a free zone or touch a ritual object and no one could "get" us. In the city, bus stop benches and/or shelters are like that for alcoholics.

If someone has been to a tavern half the night, and now walks, with a bit of a wobble, down the sidewalk, or sits unsteradily on a retaining wall, or leans against a post, he or she is likely to chat with a police officer (or ossifer). But the bus stop seems to be a police-declared free zone. If someone appears to be waiting for a bus, even three hours before the routes start, that person is much less likely to be "tagged" in this game -- or  tazed.

As a person who's at the bench or shelter because I'm actually catching the bus, I have mixed feelings about this informal policy. On one hand, the shelters stink because people who've drunk a can of beer an hour have to pee often.  And they have learned from experience that the bus shelter rule is a little like baseball; if they take too large a lead off third base, they might end up "out" (or rather in, for thirty days). So a person full of cheap beer waits for traffic to clear, then returns that rented beer at the convenient drop-off zone, determinted by the users to be two feet from the bus stop bench, and nccessarly uphill, away from the street.

Now, if U.S. cities had public urinals like Paris and Amsterdam do, that'd be really good. Or if we could use spray-paint on the pavement or some signs or something  to create roomy Heavy Drinker Zones away from the bus stops, where loaded people couldn't be tagged "it" -- oh wait, we have those already: the Old Port in Portland, the Short North in Columbus, Bourban Street in New Orleans.

But there's another side to it, too. People who left the tavern at two a.m. and have been sitting outside for four or five hours, drinking Pabst in warm cans from the convenience store, are interesting, especially in pairs. And they are mostly gentle souls. The truly problematic people at seven a.m. aren't at the bus shelter. Those people either passed out next to an alley dumpster, or they already got hauled off to the pokey, or they've found their way to one of those "argument corners" where groups of eight or ten people stand and yell at each other to work out their differences. These street corners aren't free zones, exactly, but a two-person police patrol isn't going to get into the middle of that. Neither would I.

So my early-morning bus stop companions tend to be the mellowest people from last night's partying crowd. Would I want them as neighbors, tenants, or someone with whom to share custody of children? No. These folks laugh at rules, they become angry over very small things, and they're pretty focused on themselves. But man, are they funny.  And insightful. and creative, ingenious, crafty.  And they've been where I've never been, and seen what I've never seen. Of course, they love people like me, who enjoy a good story.

The stories often involve the Cold War betseen the intoxicated and those who wear a badge. "See him?" says one of two mostly toothless skinny men sharing a bus shelter with me near the Graceland Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio. He (the man closest to me) is waving a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers to indicate a police officer sitting in a squad car at the intersec of Morse Road and High St.  "He knows me!"

Thus begins a tale of years-long rivalry, foment by this guy's drinking buddy, into the dramatic moment of the speaker being loaded into the back seat of a squad car and driven out into the hinterlands. He was let out, in shirt sleeves during damp cool weather, along Route 310 between Reynoldsburg and Pataskala, about twenty miles out of the city. Since the guy had no phone, no one to call anyway, and no money, he walked back to Columbus. This took a day and a half, including a nap he took in a weed-filled drainage ditch. The ditch "wasn't bad" to sleep in, he reported, "except for the chiggers." He extended his leg and indicated, with the lit cigarette, that he'd been bitten from groin to ankle.  When he got back to his favorite tavern, three people bought him beers. (The drinking buddy claimed to have been one of these buyers, but I had my doubts.) Lisening to this tale of unchosen adventure I thought "The cage in the back of a cop car is really like a Have-A-Heart trap on human scale, and this guy is like that furry creature that finds its way from the woods back to your house."

Other stories the bus-bencheers tell are about family. These tales often begin with a listing of my companions' adult children. Most of all of them, unsurprisingly, live a long way off.

"My oldest boy lives in Cincinnati," says a woman who has her hair in the same loose topknot which makes Ma Kettle so recognizable. When the straps of this woman's  tie-dye tank top move behind her bare shoulder, I see the overlapping deep tan lines, in three or four patinas, of skin exposed to outdoor sun for nine or ten months out of the year.

The weather this particular day is brisk, as it often is in Portland, Maine. I myself am wearing a denim overshirt over a tee shirt, and I'm still a bit chilly. The woman next to me, who's my age, seems totally acclimated and comfortable in the tank top paired with jersey pedal-pushers which have a drawstring waist. There are beads and tiny bells (without clappers) at the drawstring ends. My companion is clean, her teeth are both white and all there, and her outfit matches. But her exhaled breath smells intensely like some sweet hard liquor -- rum? peach brandy?

The woman in tie-dye is not just comfy, but happy. She knows everyone and waves and smiles at people walking and driving by, and at drivers of buses going up the other side of Congress Street. Some of them yell back.

 "My youngest son joined the Navy," she tells me, "and then when he got out, he liked it so much in San Diego that he just stayed. He calls me all the time and says he wants me to go out there and live." She stops talking long enough to yell "How you doin'?" through the open driver's window of a city utility truck driven by a uniformed man. The woman glances back at me again. "He sends me money orders for bus fare, or an Amtrak itcket, but I just send them right back to him. I don't like California." She scans my face to see if I believe her; I don't. She turns away to wave at a man in a red-and-yellow striped kitchen apron who is setting up a lunch cart on Monument Square. He doesn't seem to see her, so she cups her hands around her mouth. "LIONEL! Yo, LIONEL!" He looks up, a little startled, to see her enthusiastic wave. "It's Cathy!" she calls. "You know, CATHY?"

Lionel is not sure what to do, because he thinks she's yelling at him aboutnot putting the lunch cart where it is. He stands for a moment, holding a bundle of long white waxed paper bags which will hold hot dogs in buns later. Cathy smiles at him, and Lionel looks relieved and turns to tuck the hot dog bags into a compartuent under the grill top of the lunch cart.


Cathy has returned to the listing of her children. "Now my two girls, they're both -- you know, in between. . .the two girls are together in the middle between the two boys is what I'm trying to say. Autumn is getting herself straightened up; she's made some mistakes and she's paid for them, and I'm proud of her for what she's done to make things right. She gets to come home in the fall." Cathy pauses and this gives me time to process her interaction with Lionel. He really doesn't seem to recognize her, despite her friendliness and knowing his name.

Now Cathy flaps her hand energetically at two sight-seers who are looking at the Tour Hours sign in front of the Longfellow House, and I put it all together.  Cathy knows none of these people. They just wave because she smiles so broadly and has so much energy.

"Tasha, now, has two kids of her own," says Cathy and though she continues to beam at strangers, her voice is tinged with emotions that aren't happiness.  "I don't see 'em too much. She has them on lessons, you know, piano and all that. I got both girls both matching sundresses, like this color" -- Cathy tugs at the stretchy fabric of her tank top, which actually has splashes of every color  -- "because they want to be like Grammy." Cathy stops to put a piece of chewing gum into her mouth, after offering me the crinkled green pack of Wrigley's spearmint. The combination of mint chewing gum and fruity alcohol, as Cathy exhales, is not as unpleasant as I'd feared it would be. "I got 'em the outfits for Christmas, but I decided to wait and see 'em closer to summer. Too cold for sleeveless anyways." She looks down at her tank top, then laughs. She sounds happier again. "They're not like Grammy. They get cold. So it's better to wait and see 'em and give 'em the outfits when it's warm anyways." Cathy checks my face again but I hide any sign of disbelief and we smile at each other.

Cathy leans forward suddenly, over her crossed arms, to yoohoo at a substantial woman in a hot-pink sweatshirt who's come out of an office building on the other side of Congress Street. The woman's expertly using a hand cart to load a very large tropical fern in a heavy terra cotta planter into the back of a hot-pink van with the logo "Pat's Plants." Pat slams shut the rear door of the van, hops into the driver's seat, and gives two toots on the horn as the van pulls away from the curb. Cathy looks pleased, though I really don't think Pat saw or heard her.

Even when intoxicated people aren't all that fun at the bus stop, they are often fascinating. To me, nayway. Part of it is that I can't figure out how they are even alive. I remember a wizened old fellow -- not the creepy one who suddenly reached up to run his fingers throgh my hair and I had to go home and shampoo twice, but a different one.  This was a diferent guy, probably in his late eventies judging from his worn-out face and stooped posture as he sat. I was on the same bench with him, in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. I sat closer to the street and leafed through a left-behind issue of the local paper, then called The Herald-Telephone (aka "The Horrible-Terrible"). The man was sitting to my left, I remember. While he didn't look or smell as though he'd been drinking that morning. his face was a map of decades of honkytonkin', fightin'. and runnin' from the law.

This was in the early 1980s, on a really nice summer day. I worked second shift in those years and I was killing time till I got on a southbound bus to start work at five in the evening.  I remember it was breezy that sunny afternoon, and the ground was covered with ever-changing dappled shadows from the gently swaying tree branches. All the leaves all rustled in a pleasant way. If it hadn't been such a nice day, I might not have talked to the older man, because I was still skittish after the awful hair-touching incident of a couple weeks before. 


At that time, the single central bus stop in downtown Bloomington had old-fashioned wooden slat park benches, made with wood planted green and with two metal side supports.  Three long narrow slats formed the seat and two slats served for the backrest. Paired benches, facing each other, were set ninety degrees to the street, which was probably Lincoln. (The north-south streets downtown have Presidents' names and now I can't remember if Grant came before or after Lincoln.) In other places, bus benches are usually parallel to the street so that you sit and look at the sides of cars and trucks you aren't riding in. But the benches in Bloomington, near the shoe-repair shop next door to Ladyman's Cafe, were set at right angles to the street. There was no shelter, because people were worried that a shelter would attract homeless people, who might try to get out of the rain.

That breezy day, the older guy started the conversation by saying something about some photo in the newspaper. I am a sucker for anybody's story that begins with a picture from history: "I fought over there," or "I worked there in the 1950s," or "I had a yellow Plymouth Fury just like that." I glanced over to see his pointing finger, and noticed that his long thin arm came close to looking mummified. The skin was of a similar color and texture to smoked herring. This webbed, tight skin wasn't just age, but rather the kind of pickled preservation I saw in biology specimens in high school biology class. Sixty years of all whiskey and no water had virtually preserved this guy while he was alive, and when this guy died, the embalmer wouldn't have much to do.

I was already impressed, without even hearing his stories, that he'd lived this long. My amazement level went up as he began listing his surgeries. Doctors had sewed him up a number of times. He'd been shot twice, once by an enemy soldier, I assumed at the very end of World War I, in the calf of his left leg. The second shooting involved some sort of mix-up around playing cards for money.

That second bullet had fragmented after bouncing off a rib and a piece of the metal had gone into his spleen and no one realized that till a couple days later, when he got a fever of a hundred and five. The docs had to do an emergency splenectomy after giving him gas with some sort of portable canister. The surgery happened as he laid on an unsterilized gurney, wearing his street clothes, in the hallway on the way to the surgical suite.  As he explained the procedure to me, the wizened man indicated the location of his spleen to me by vaguely waing his palm over the wrong side of his body; just for a moment I thought he was going to pull up his sport shirt to show me the operation site, like Lyndon Johnson showing reporters his gall bladder scar. The spleen is on the left side of the body, but he was indicating an area near his liver, more to the right. I wans't clear if he was just remembering the discomfort in a mirror-like fashion or if the bullet had maybe hit his appendix and not his spleen.


It didn't matter as he'd moved on. It turned out he'd also had been stabbed with a steak knife by his ex-wife after she caught him with a floozie at a nightclub (cue either "Attack of the 50-foot Woman" or "Pistol-Packin' Mama") but the knife had been the cheap aluminum kind you buy at K-Mart, with the flimsy plastic handle, and she'd only gotten his scapula anyway. Shortly after that, this same woman rammed this guy's car with her own car, and that hadn't been too good for his neck. Then he had tried to chase her down by driving seventy-five or eighty miles an hour on a rutted, winding two-lane road, and she made the curve but he didn't and that was also not too good for his neck.

 Warch trailer for "Attack" -- this scene is 1 minute into the video

Listen to "Pistol Packin' Mama" on YouTube

There were, I learned, various other uninteresting surgeries and repairs for this and that. Then we got to the big one: Legionnaire's Disease. Are you old enough to emember that first big outreak? A bunch of people got sick in 1976, at a Philly hotel where a lot of American Legion members had gathered for a convention.

My bus bench buddy wasn't in the American Legion, or if he was, he wasn't at that convention. He contracted the illness in 1979, while managing a crummy motel somewhere near the Indiana-Kentucky border. The job paid badly, with no benefits, but he got a free room next door to the Manager's Office. Before we got to this illness, I was really starting to feel pretty bad for this guy; here he'd been, before even getting sick, spending what should have been his retirement years managing a downscale motel and living in Unit 1-A as a perk.

The room was decent, he said, with some type of ancient metal steam or radiant hot-water wall unit which supplied what passed for heat. Apparently the last motel manager had lived with his girlfriend off-site so this old radiator heating thing hadn't been turned on for a while. Whatever the ambient temperature was at the No-Tell Motel, it was in the perfect range for growing plenty of Legionella bacterial cultures. So after this guy lived through war and various shootings, stabbings, and vehicular mishaps, not to mention downing several hundred bottles of Old Crow, it was teeny bacteria that nearly did him in.

"Kind of like Alexander the Great," I said, mainly because I wanted a chance to say something. "That's why he never finished conquering the world. All his men got dystentary."

"I had that in the Army," he said. "Dys -- dyst -- dystentary. Caught that in Guam. They give you sulfur pills for it. Them things taste awful."

Guam? The Army? Sulfa drugs? I started doing math in my head. Okay, if this guy was in Guam in the Second World War, and he was on the island in the middle 40s, when sulfa pills were available. . .  I did some quick adding and subtracting. He must have been say, 20 years old in 1945. Which meant that he was born around 1925. Which meant that he was, in 1982, he was. . .fifty-seven years old?? And here I was thinking he was a well-preserved seventy-seven or so.  So it wasn't that he looked great for seventy-seven, it was that he looked rough for fifty-seven. Yikes.

Lay off the booze, kids.

Zoo Bus

The Zoo Bus, custom-painted with long-legged flamingos, pulled up to the downtown stop, and I put away my highlighter and Nutrition in Sows and Boars. As the bus doors whooshed open, I slipped my bus pass out of my purse for the fifty-eighth time.

"Hi Sheila," said the driver. He waved away my pass. Of course we recognized each other. He also drove the route I took home from Children’s Hospital on work days.

I looked down the narrow aisle to see if the center back seat was free. From center back, it was seven steps to the exit door. From the rear door, I could step onto the brick walkway and avoid the mushy grass near the curb.

Behind me,I heard children’s voices and the squeak of stroller wheels. I stepped to the side as two boys thundered down the long ridged rubber mat, and right to the spot I’d planned to take for myself.

"No fair!” the smaller, rounder boy cried, as his wiry brother, smirking, threw himself onto the orange plastic seat.

"Jerome, make a space for Jeremy to sit!” called his mother. “And scoot over! I have to put Mandy’s stroller where you’re at.”

I gave up, turned around, and took a seat where I was. The tall man with brown hair, the one who'd been sitting two rows from the back on the driver’s side of the aisle for two months, had already felt too close for me when I had been sitting in my regular seat.

Now I had inadvertently chosen a seat across the aisle from him. A camouflage-pattern plastic badge, identical to mine, was, as always, pinned to his sweater. The man used a portable keyboard balanced on his long thighs. The keyboard was attached by a black wire to a smartphone. A large brown book lay on the next seat. Each time I'd passed thos man on my way to the back center seat, the man had raised his eyes briefly. I could tell he was always waiting for me to walk by, but didn't want me to know it.

Now he and I were looking right at each other, from opposite sides of the bus aisle. He looked very pleased. He unplugged the portable keyboard and folded it in half. He stowed the smartphone in his pocket, and picked up the leatherette book lying next to him.

“Another Tuesday at the zoo,” he said, smiling down at the oversize volume in his lap. “It's been about a year. I guess, since we both started to ride the jungle bus.”

“Week fifty-eight,” I said. “My first shift was on a Thursday." Now that I'd spoken, I feared he'd come sit with me. I didn’t like to talk to people; that’s why I always had a book with me. But the man with the brown hair just smiled and settled back with with his own large book. I spotted three meted binder rings.

It wasn't a textbook, I realized; it was some sort of photo album or scrapbook. I quickly opened my own textbook to reed about selenium deficiency in older sows.

I was only pretending to read. I kept feeling distracted by a noisy back-row argument between Jerome and Jeremy over who would hold the zoo membership card. And my thoughts were wandering. What kind of photo album did that brown-haired man have? Why would someone use a scrapbook as reading matter, especially on the Zoo Bus? I personally could easily read a book per week using the forty-five-minute ride time. Yet this man simply paged through a scrapbook which he'd probably compiled himself. He evidently had extra time on his hands, or he hadn't developed a strategy for effective time management.

The bus swung around the big left-hand curve which took us west to the river and then up Riverside Drive. I stopped looking out the bus window  and returned my eyes to my text. I was facing an exam that evening. Jerome and Jeremy kept squabbling, which irritated me confirming my error in spending twenty years as a dietician conducting useless research into childhood health. I didn’t like kids.

My current job involved research the world didn't need because we already know how to help children with obesity. The secret to a low body mass index? Fewer Twinkies, more kickball. But I had to keep working away at the study because I needed the paychecks while I was going back to school. I was forty-two and forced to fit my graduate work around my hospital schedule.

The Zoo Bus made the final turn into the front gate entrance, and I put away my textbook on swine nutrition. I was the first person to line up at the back entrance but as I exited, I sensed that the tall man from across the aisle was right behind me. I felt a little tense, but he and I took different paths away from the bus stop.

My morning as spent as a backup vet tech in the Rhino House, where a two-ton male had his hooves trimmed. I leaned back against the tiled wall end watched the vets attend to the rhino's three-toed feet. As e trampling alternative. I gave the vets a better chance of escape if the sedative level was too low. It was a good learning experience. At the Zoo, just as everywhere else, the newbie would be first to be stepped on.

I survived. At noon, I carried my satchel to the Flamingo Bay outdoor cafe. I saw the tall brown-heirer man from the Zoo Bus there, eLone at a grillwork table. The plastic name badge pinned to my sweater, I now noticed, said "Anthony." In front of him were the leatherette album, the smartphone and keyboard, and a small white paper plate on which which portobello mushroom slices neatly arranged on it. I glanced briefly at his table as I carried my satchel toward an empty table at the far end of the food court, then I pulled out the chair at an empty table. I waited a moment, then pushed the chair back in and went to Anthony’s table instead.

"May I join you?” I asked. Anthony nodded. His expression was both pleased and surprised.

1 sat down and took my insulated lunch cooler from my satchel. I hesitated over the front compartment, where my swine text was tucked away, then decided that I would take the book out but place it to the side.

I looked at Anthony’s scrapbook. "Project documentation?” I asked. “Family photos?”

"Cats,” he said, spinning the album around on the black mesh tabletop for me to see. Four vinyl pockets, two per page, each contained a color photograph of a different cat. “I’m digitizing these into here.” He tapped the screen of his phone.

“You must have had some reason for using emulsion film,” I said, lifting my salad container from my cooler.

“I can’t adjust the pixel count for the warm, fuy look I need,” said Anthony. “So I take an old-fashioned picture and then scan it.” A plastic-wrapped salad, with a packet of bleu cheese dressing sitting on top of the tightly-stretched plastic wrap, sat next to Anthony’s little plate of mushrooms.

“Saving your salad for later?” I asked. I shook my bottle of vinaigrette till the herbal flecks swirled in spirals from top to bottom.

“I can’t get my dressing packet open,” he said, turning a vinyl page to reveal a photo of a Maine coon cat with a very fluffy face. He continued to lift the pages of the album, settling each page carefully after its trip over the bifurcated arches. “It says ‘Tear Here’ but evidently they had trouble with the perforator.”

“I have plenty of oil and vinegar,” I said. “Would you care for some?”

“Yes, that would be nice,” he said, He carefully moved the photo album out of the way and then pulled the salad container close. I handed him the little jar. He carefully tipped the jar so that none of the herbed oil ran down the bubbled outer surface. He set the jar down near my plate, clean and dry.

I could not to take my attention from the album of cat pictures. I indicated it with my salad fork. “Are you a cat person, Anthony?” I took a bite of romaine leaf. “I’m Sheila, by the way."

“I know,” he said, and that made me a little nervous. I kind of had craziness, cat-loving, and stalking a bit conflated in my mind.

But then he said. “Wondering how I knew? The driver always greets you by name.” He poked the leaves of his salad, distributing the dressing evenly. “I am a cat person, but no cats actually live with me.” He carefully wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, then picked up the smartphone, tapped the screen and held the device so that I could view the web page on the screen. “Adopt-A-Pal Kitty Companions,” said the heading, above a row of cartoon cats: a tabby, a Siamese, a Persian, and one which was surely a jellicle cat.

"Oh, I see," I said.

Anthony finished his salad and his plaste of mushrooms. He dabbed dressing from his mustache, pushed the dishes away, and then picked up his phone again. He swiped through the smartphone photos in rapid succession. "This is the hospice page, companions for people who are, um, at the end of their lives. And here are cats good for lonely people who have lost a spouse. This next page are all very loving cats for kids with attention deficit disorder, or former prison inmates, or formerly homeless people who now have a stable place to live.”

“Do you match older animals with people in hospice?” I said. "Kittens with the children™

"I sort the matches by temperament,” said Anthony. “Human and feline."

"So you think animals have personalities?” I said.

"You don't?” he said. “What about the animals here at the zoo? Or the ones you study in school?”

“I started out with poultry,” I said. “We measured feed taken in and waste produced. Too much waste means profit loss.”

“I’m not sure chickens are the best choice for a study of the animal mind,” said Anthony. “Those little pointy faces are hard to read.” He smiled. “You’ve moved on to large animals, then?” He indicated Nutrition in Sows and Boars.

“Yes,” I said. “I work with swine. If I was twenty-five, I might look at more options. But I need to get my degree while I’m still young enough to get into a practice.” I used my fork to lilt carrot shreds from the bottom of my salad container.

Anthony shut the album of cat photos. “Would you like to come over for dinner on Thursday? I promise you won’t have to eat with a cat sitting on your head.”

I opened my scheduler, and Anthony whistled at the colored-coded rectangles.

“I’ve got so much to do that I have to stay organized,” I said.

“But you enjoy it, too,” he said. “Being organized.”

“I do,” I said. “I do enjoy it.” I colored in the Thursday evening slot and shut the schedule.

Anthony looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to go clean buckets at Manatee Coast. I'll ie: you finish your lunch in peace.” He rose, tossed his trash into the mouth of a hippo-shaped trash can, and headed for the gift shop.

“Anthony?” I called. “Aren’t you going to Manatee Coast?”

“What?” he said, stopping to look at me. “Am I turned around again?” He shaded his eyes toward the gift shop, where long-armed monkey puppets hung from a mini circus tent. "They keep changing the layout on me.”

I pointed in the right direction, and Anthony crossed to the correct walkway. He stoppea “On Thursday, do you want to ride the Zoo Bus to the Park & Ride lot, and I can give yu a lift to my place? I can show you the shelter, too, if you want.”

“Sure," I said, nodding. He smiled. I watched him pass the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cart. Then I pulled The Nutrition of Sows and Boars closer, and turned to Chapter 4.


*****


The Park & Ride parking lot was three blocks from the bus stop at the courthouse square. Anthony's car, a Volvo station wagon, had four huge tubs of cat litter in the back bay.

"Good for traction in the winter,” Anthony said as he unlocked my door and went around to the driver’s side. “My dad will come by some weekend and help me haul them in. My back's not great. The walking at the zoo is good, therapeutic and all that.” He waited for me to fasten my seat belt, then he started the engine. He made a left turn to get out of the lot, then drove down the two-lane street, past a row of older modular homes, all in light pastels.

"The shelter’s up the road,” said Anthony, when we reached his driveway. "We could leave our things here, and walk up.”

"I always walk if I get the chance,” I said. “I’d walk to the zoo if it was five miles closer to my house.”

"I’d walk with you,” said Anthony, swseetly. “I would miss you too much to keep taking the Zoo Bus." He hurried ahead. The asphalt driveway ended and we now walked on pea gravel embedded into hard-packed dirt.

Anthony slowed his pace so I could catch up. “I hope you’ll like my cooking. I’m a vegan so it's hard restaurant food I can eat.” He grinned. “I bought some organic chicken. I bet you're a carnivore.”

"High-protein, low-carb diet,” I said. “Keeps my blood sugar regulated.,"

The corrugated-steel warehouse was unmarked and a bit corroded in places. I wondered if I was foolish to go inside it with Anthony. Maybe all those cat photographs were a ploy. But no, even as we stood outside the building, I heard a faint but insistent chorus of meows from inside. These grew louder as Anthony stepped up to a gray steel door with metal grillwork over the window. He tapped buttons on a security panel.

“Cat kidnappers?” I said, looking at the panel.

Anthony tilted his head to indicate he’d heard me. The speaker over the button panel buzzed, and with a click, the metal door popped open. “I thought I better keep it secure. Thieves might think there’s machinery or tools in there.”

Inside, Anthony used his foot to push aside some boxes. “I could be using the space a little better,” he said, shifting a wobbly tower of cat chow bags out of a path between carpeted scratching posts and plastic jugs of scoopable litter.

Anthony’s makeshift shelter wasn't unpleasant, really. Cluttered, chaotic, and overfilled with cats, yes, but it had a good pine-cleaner smell, and cozy areas for the cats to congregate. Pieces of yard-sale furniture made the walled-off areas look a bit like my first apartment. I liked a funny little 1960s side table with a dark faux-wood finish on it, a lamp rising through its second tier. A fat cat with tufty ears sat on the main surface while a second feline sat on the upper ledge, tapping the big cat on the back of the head with a playful paw.

The air was filled with cat sounds, some faint and some noisy. Several American shorthairs circled my ankles, adorning my slacks with wavy tendrils of whitish hair. A tiny calico cat stood in the improvised pathway, yowling. I could see to the very back of its ridged tongue. But now my attention was drawn to an overhead network of elaborate walkways, tunnels, scenic overview and nesting cradles, where a sleek black cat was being chased by a similar one. I looked at Anthony. “Did you build all this?”

He looked proud. “My father was a contractor. See all the garage doors?”

I realized that many of the walls had raised panels and tiny windows.

“Dad and I installed most of the garage doors on this side of town,” he said. “I worked fo him every summer. We sold the business a couple years ago. He didn't need the warehouse, and when I made the nonprofit for Adopt-A-Pal, Dad donated the building to us.”

“It’s truly amazing, Anthony,” I said, spotting an aerial ziggurat which offered plush-covered stairways for streams of cats. Inside the kitty-size Babylonian monument, cats perched in oval cubbyholes. In the shadows, I saw tiers of green and yellow eyes with narrow pupil slits. There were oddities: a mismatched pair, a single eye, a pair of copper-colored eyes which drew me in. These particular eyes held a meaningful glow, like that of an indicator light signaling in red, orange, or pulsing yellow that one's attention is required. The glow in the copper eyes said. "I have seen what I need. You are what I need.”

As I looked at the cats, all contented or curious or busy, Anthony drifted next to me. I understood I, like the cats, had found a refuge.