Stupid bus.
Sometimes the stupid bus feels like it will never stupid come.
The steel bench doesn’t help. Its cold, hard ways do not a good sit make. You see people intervene with objects, trying to improve the comfort. Newspapers, sweaters, cardboard, foam, their hands, but usually not cereal.
If you’re the older woman who catches the 61 at the base of the Pulaski Bridge, cereal is not off-limits.
The bus was never coming. I was sitting on the steel bunch bench waiting for the 61. A woman came and sat next to me. She soon agreed that the 61 was going to be awhile. She wasn’t going to endure without some adjustments. In my peripheral vision, and to the tune of Artie Shaw’s My Blue Heaven that was coming in through my iPod, I watched this woman take out a big box of Rice Krispies cereal from her bag of groceries and stick it under her rump and crush down onto it. I marveled at her gumption and wondered if this was a tried and true method or was she inventing on the fly. Whatever the case, it was working.
For about 30 seconds. Then it wasn’t.
The bag let out a sharp pop, the cardboard swung open its gates, and a stream of rice krispies cascaded to the cold sidewalk below, lowering her slowly to the bench surface. And suddenly bus 61 roared upon us, lending some added craziness to the scene.
She tried to save what she could of her cereal and published the right emotion to the situation: she started cackling.
“AHHHHHHHH! It broke!”, she yelled and smiled at me.
“I was impressed you made it that long!”, I encouraged.
Then we both scrambled to ready our metrocards and join the line of others, some who saw the rice krispy scene and others who did not.