Let us now praise nebby men
My boyf and I ride the bus into downtown together almost every morning. Today we managed to find two seats close to each other and, after sitting down, began talking about random things – plans for the rest of the week, what to have for dinner tomorrow night – topics that would make it clear to everyone around us that we were together. Then, during a routine glasses cleaning, his crazy, supposedly indestructible glasses snapped cleanly, suddenly in half. The elderly man sitting next to me commiserated that the same thing had happened to him many times, and he had four or five pairs of broken glasses sitting at home because he was unable to throw them away.
Conversation turned to other things, and soon the bus was lumbering down Smithfield Street. The boyf got up to leave and I prepared to follow, but the man next to me gave me a knowing smile.
“Just make sure he doesn’t buy the engagement ring at the same place he bought the glasses,” he muttered to me.
So, I had a few options. I could have explained to him that I don’t believe in engagement rings. I could have just ignored him and gotten off the bus. I could have told him we’re already married and I’m, like, totally pissed that I don’t have any bling to show for it.
But I just laughed along and told him to have a good day. This is an imperfect example of why I moved back to Pittsburgh after living a couple of years in DC. During my DC commutes on the Metro, a train packed full of people would be completely quiet, engrossed in their Express papers or listening to their iPods, the silence broken only by the operator’s announcements of which stop we were at. I missed my days in Pittsburgh, when a guy would walk up to me at a bus stop, ask me if the 54C had come yet, then tell me all about how he was going to the South Side to help his grandmother make sauce with the tomatoes his aunt had dropped off the day before, the tomatoes that he had helped her plant in her backyard garden up on the Slopes. I missed the humanity, the interaction, the general pleasantness that marks public transportation here. It’s not like that all the time, not by a long shot. But at least I don’t feel like a freak for actually talking and laughing with someone else during my morning commute.
:: Apr.01.2008 :: Daily, Pittsburgh :: 1 Comment »
oh! this is one of the things that I love most about Pittsburgh, and one of the points that I made sure to make when I was recently defending the city and its poor public transit system to some haters.
Though I do envy D.C.’s metro system.