Being what my local bus
company (MVRTA) refers to as "transportation disabled" is
a lot like living in a different country. The inhabitants
for the most part speak a different language.
The signs prohibiting smoking and
pigeon-feeding are in Spanish but the woman carrying two
bags of Sevin in a plastic shopping bag addresses me in a
language I do not recognize. It's definitely not Spanish,
nor Khmer, nor Vietnamese. She acts as if I understand
her. The weird thing is I sort of do. She's asking me if
I smoke before she'll let me sit on the bench she's
staked out for the 55 minute wait 'til the number 33 bus
leaves. Then she is asking me to watch her bags of Sevin
while she goes to check on the schedule or something.
Once we're on the bus she chatters nonstop to the driver.
He answers her in Spanish. She gets off at the elderly
housing. I wonder what she needs all that Sevin
for.
It's a slow country where a trip
from North Andover to Andover, which were once two
parishes in the same small town, takes an hour if you
make the connection and two hours if you don't. Oddly,
the sight of the number 32 bus pulling out of the station
just as 33 is arriving doesn't upset me much. I buy a new
bus pass and find a place to sit for an hour or so and
watch the pigeons not being fed. They're ever so hopeful
though. One pigeon walks all the way across the bus
station straight toward me. It stops at my feet and fixes
me with a gaze so intense I start to feel like he's
really communicating with me. It's one thing to have
understood the woman speaking the unrecognizable language
the other day but quite another to think I understand
what this pigeon wants.
Unable to read a book or a
newspaper without using my left arm and bored with
watching pigeons not being fed, I walk laps around the
station wishing I knew the neighborhood well enough to
find something meaningful to occupy my attention. I
briefly wish I had a PDA or something else that could
fetch my email. Not that there's anything all that
important that it can't wait until I get home. Finally
settling in again for a long wait I realize I have
entered a country so far from the mainstream that it will
take me some time to learn my way around all these
marginal tributaries. Maybe tomorrow I'll bring my
camera.
