Love is a Bus

Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop





Goodbye you, you long lost summer
Leaving me behind you
Revealing things for lovers that may find you
I still hang on to every word that day, you passed my way

Like an intermission between dreams, I awoke from the grips of slumber, looked out the window, looked at the clock, and dropped my face straight into my pillow from a height of about 8 inches. Then I noticed a crispness in the air coming through the large open window across the concrete floor.

I am pretty sure I wrote something at the beginning of the summer about falling in love by the time the late afternoons turn dark and the leaves fall from their resting place above the hometown's avenues, but I never read back into the archive, so I am not entirely certain if that is the case, but if I did, what a ridiculous prophecy to make, which, is exactly why I must have done it. But it's moments like lazing in my new leather chair on Sunday, looking at Vernice with her legs tucked to one side while reading the Globe and Mail on the sectional, both of us hungover, and enjoying the lazy morning sun after a heavy breakfast; or standing in my washroom with Frannie, while she fixes her hair into a pony tail before going downstairs for a drink, that make the idea of falling in love by the end of summer as sure as the the bus that goes by my place, day in and night out.

I talked to a bus driver at the party I was at on Saturday night. Remington, Leroy, and I had just finished piling into the living room, drunk on straight whiskey from plastic cups snuck into a baseball game we had just come from. We started dancing like maniacs on the lush white carpet, and then I attached a souvenir from the game to the wall as a house warming present. Eventually we made our way to the dining room where a group of people were making tempura with a large pot of heated oil and a heaping stack of vegetables in the middle of the table. The bus driver was frying some yams and was talking about how he mostly argued with people all day. I told him how great it is to hear a bus driver call out the stops without the use of a microphone. There's nothing like the sound of a good bus driver belting out the street names with a slow drawl as the road signs fly by. It's a sound of the city, and one that is being replaced by machines. He mostly drove the 9 route, I said I didn't ride the 9 that much, but would come for a ride just hear the way he calls the stops. The human voice is becoming nostalgic.

I've mostly been riding my bike lately though. The feeling of meandering back and forth through traffic in the urban core on a sunny day is just too appealing, and it's free. But soon, the rains will come, and I will look forward to standing in the dark slick streets waiting for a bus, that I know will eventually come.