Another special edition... Riding the Busses....

This morning, I got off to a half-way late start, and in the summer, the public transportaton isn't usually over-filled.

And there was a late mom and her daughter, and the litle girl went to look at the poster above, and said, 'Mommy, LOOK!' Well it just was a poster of a commermorative issue of a magazine that gets published Sundays in a newspaper here, and that was the title cover. I believe it was a photo by Herb Ritts 20 years ago. It's above. And her mother said, 'It's ok, and if you don't like it, you don't have to look. Some people LIKE doing that.' End of discussion. And the kid, she was maybe five, studied it and turned her attention to other things.

And I thought, OMG, if this were 'Murka, there would be screaming jeebie Baptists and puritans out screaming in protest. I hadn't really paid much attention to the poster heretofore, it was up for several days. It was a healthy thing to do, that lady, and her kid won't think much of it in the future....

So I had to smile. That must have been the most HEALTHY reaction I have ever heard live. And sensible.

So I thought the day was starting out nicely, it was sensible.

Then the bus came. One had broken down somewhere so mine was overfilled, and the pushing and shoving and stepping on your feet and agression were something to behold. Rudeness, no one excusing themselves for stepping on your feet, it was the other side of the coin, and by the time I got off there I was one very pissed off person.

But.... I got a hiatus waiting for my transfer....

Which turned out to be a sad sign of a coin. A boy of about eight or nine or so with his mother, and he was very frightened, with his mother, whose eyes looked so devoid of life and joy and full of hurt. And all the way down, it was, 'Mommy, is the needle going to hurt?' She was very attentive to him, and said no, but the look in her eyes was... just dead. At first I thought he was being taken to a vaccination, or something. He had very thick glasses for a child his age, and was very clinging to her. Again and again, she calmed him, told him the needle wouldn't hurt, and he asked where they would put it in.

And then she put her finger on his inner thigh to show him, and promised him it wouldn't hurt. I died inside for those poor people. Because I knew it meant insulin, and that child had diabetes 1, the worst form. And his mother was hanging on to every shred of dignity she possessed, and it was formidable. I could hardly look away, and it was rude to observe, and made her uncomfortable. A very dear friend of mine had that form from childhood on and died at thirty. I wanted to go over and say a few words, but that would have hardly been appropriate. Or taken wrongly.

So I shut up, and kept on looking out the window. But hearing, and sometimes observing.

I was so happy to get off at my stop. It was heart-rending.

Obviously, I got off to Peter's in a very bad mood.

But calmed down.

And did what I do....

Coming back, there were two teenagers just behind me arguing about what goes best on their Wurst when they go to hot-dog stands, and the one was for mustard, the other was for ketchup, and they went on and on, as kids will do. I found it funny. And we got to Jacki, the end station and were getting off, and I said, 'Kids? Next time try it with mayonnaise and horseradish.'

They didn't get the connection at first, till I was about twenty feet away, and heard them falling apart laughing, because they found it so funny, yelling 'Mayonnaise! Mayonnaise!' and laughing to beat the band.

So what can we gain from this? Riding the busses is like riding a roller coaster of emotions. And I often can't keep my mouf shut.

So it is time to keep my appointment with my lung expert. Werner called me this morning at six thirty a.m. No sense of propriety. And he came up with one of his horrendous fart jokes.

'You have to blow into a machine as hard as you can, so take a deep breath. And then, THEN, you let it all out the back door.'

And I said, 'If I do THAT, she'll throw me out the third story winder onto the Hauptplatz!'

And he said, 'But there won't be any more air, and you'll land on the ground like a new-born sparrow and light as a feather.'

So he finally beat me at my own game. Sorry Dad... but that was funny. But then again, you know my humour....

So I finally got a diagnosis. I have the first stages of asthma. In Harvey Fierstein's 'Torch Song Trilogy', the main character alsways says, 'Now isn't THAT a kick in the pants?!?!'

But that is a post for later.

This is about riding the roller-coaster of emotions that can be riding the busses. You see a cross-section of everyone, and some things are very funny, some things are very sad, and some days are just normal----little grey people riding to wherever they are going.

So it became a favorite topic of mine lately. My 'special editions' are when extraordinary things happen on them, and fun for me to share. The ones that make me thoughtful, or smile, or make me sad. You get on, and you never know what you are going to get.