Recent Posts

Tuesday 7 July 2015

Home And The Unseen Transfer

I bleed with weariness one mid-June evening. My being reeks of addling insomnia on the bench waiting for the homeward city bus. My head is down, ear buds in, hands in jeans pockets and legs extended and crossed. An unmet woman bumps into me and abruptly sits down. Starts speaking of bus routes and detours and unreliable general contractors. At me.

She’s an unemployed widow, says she. In between her tirades on one unsatisfactory aspect of life and another, she starts in on how she’s a christian woman and about Jesus. She has much to say on the matter. From my bleary fog I notice her face, her body and her pleasant appearance. Middle age has blurred the lines some but not overly so.

She is patronizing and chatty when my only wish is to immolate myself against a deafening wall of silence and stumble home to my warm bed. No empathy is in me for distractions just now. I weigh the option of positing an opposing view on religion. But I just don’t have the energy. And the Jesus people are heavily defended. I was.

Standing in jerky, achy motions, I excuse myself from her earnest soliloquy, replace my ear buds and stretch my legs. The bus arrives in the nick of time. The detour proves less bumpy and I close my eyes. The diesel noise and foul fumes pollute the interior. Seats jostle as the driver guns down suburban streets. Stops come and go.

I transfer at the Lakeshore and there’s a long wait. I walk a stop but my feet aren’t amused. The soles are tired and sore. So I sit. I’m listening to a classic rock station. Hardly listen to the radio anymore. They were playing 1980’s music at the restaurant but it quickly wore on me. Platinum Blonde and Duran Duran have lost their appeal as decades slipped by. Little wonder.

A group of special needs folks amble up with groceries. But they don’t want to sit so they move up to the sign to wait. CCR plays, a Steppenwolf track, John Lennon’s last single. Cars stream past.

Two twenty-ish hormonal couples show up and play flirt-flirt for a bit. They emit a ‘we-just-fucked’ vibe. The girls toy at colourful straws in their slushy drinks, laughing and joking. The oral metaphor seems to amuse them no end. I avert my gaze. The bus is visible and I move toward it.

In a half hour’s time, I’m deposited at the train station in Port Credit near where I once lived. Wrong-numbered buses cycle through without a hint of the westbound 23. Brick buildings across the street catch the colours of the setting sun. The air cools and dampens.

I think of boyhood walks with my mother and sister along these tracks at sunset before the station was built. Back in the simple days before an internet age could be dreamt up. I recall the joys of playing outside, petting our cat as it stretched in the sunlight. The way our imaginations dominated our young lives. The truth of a simple life bound together by love and strength.

Lights blink on around me and the gray-haired woman sitting with her rolling walker. We are the only fools waiting on the scarce-seen 23. I remember another grayed lady I was rather fond of. I miss her still. Exhaustion is often attended by emotion. That’s the way it goes with me.

I’m sitting on a concrete abutment retaining the slope of the train platform above. Bells ding as eastbound cars slow into the station. There is a sweet smell in the twilight I can’t place. It isn’t lilac. It isn’t the cloying scent of weed. It’s lovely.

A mother and daughter saunter by and enter the converted apartment building opposite. The infestation of condos continues to wrack this former village. The city is still mainlining developer fees. Those big wheels keep on turnin' too. The fucks.

23W rolls round the corner in the failing light. I wave the lady ahead of me and step aboard after her. My Presto card beeps the scanner and I nod at the driver. Our empty bus slides through town. Hipsters crowd the patios to sip their boutique ales. Pub grub is carried out to their tables by nubile servers sporting yoga pants.

The rippling Credit shimmers in the encroaching dark. Kayakers pull out at the rowing club upriver. Yachts and sailboats sway in their harbour slips opposite. Mute and empty churchyards lit by floodlights stand abandoned. The old petro fields lie barren but for toxic trees. I nod off once or twice.

In the distance I see Silver Birch Trail and relief. Bexhall is announced and I yank the string to request a stop as we roll by. I pull myself up with the yellow bar and slope off my last bus into the suburban nightscape. Downhill I float past short-sleeved kids playing ball and teenaged boys smuggling beer to a townhouse.

Coins jangle as I pull my keys. The lock clicks and in I step. There in the dark, unseen, is my huge bed where dreams of black birds and bare breasts await me. I’m home. This long and lonely day butts out with diesel engines droning in my mind. Wheels turn. Metal clangs.

But just cause I paid the driver, it doesn’t change my destination.

~e