Old Man Winter

I have a policy about riding on public transportation (which here means planes, trains, and any other form of shared locomotion, no matter the cost or level of luxury): if someone sitting beside you keeps trying to shove something in your face, don't read it.

This policy was developed on a plane ride home from New York City my senior year of college, where I was interviewing (unsuccessfully, I would later find) for an under-paid job in educational publishing (the stuff that liberal-arts dreams are made of!). Some guy sat down next to me, as tends to happen on airplanes, and tried to talk my ear off. I made polite sounds for a few minutes, and then strategically fell asleep, not to awake until the wheels hit tarmac. In the interminably long interval between when we reached the terminal and I was able to file out into the aisle, I noticed the guy next to me fiddling with his phone quite a bit, and then holding it up for my observation by awkwardly twisting his wrist in his lap. I took out my own phone and pretended to listen to messages for the next 10 minutes, but could sort of see his phone number out of the corner of my eye.

Today, on my way to work on the El, I sat down in the only available seat, next to a sort of dirty looking older man who was writing furiously in a reporter's notebook - the type that makes it easy to flip up the pages as you scribble down notes. I've recently begun re-reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and so was fairly absorbed in my own world. I did notice that the man never stopped writing, but he seemed harmless enough. He fiddled and twitched, his pen skating across page after page. But he left me alone.

Until 2 stops before the end. Suddenly the man began stretching wildly, whacking me in the arm and waving his notepad in my face. And so what could I do? I looked. I suppose that I hoped it would be something interesting and odd, the Good Will Hunting of the bag man set. But all it said was "Jesus Christ is your personal savior." That's apparently all he had been writing for upwards of half an hour.

Quelle boring, bag man.

On a mildly related topic, I am actually looking forward to the onset of winter. I remember getting a text message from Chicago last October, saying "OH my jesus it is snowing!" Ominous though it may seem, that must be coming soon. When I was younger I would curl up on the couch with a book when the weather was dark, consciously turning a blind eye whenever a spot of sun appeared (rare enough, in a Seattle winter). I was protecting the aura of mystery around my reading, the sense that I was bearing something along with the characters in my book of ghost stories.

This may also be why I generally ignore the offerings of public transportation strangers: if I don't see the mundane nature of what they're doing, I can hold them in hope.