22-December-2009 5:54AM

I walk the three-quarters of a mile necessary to intersect the “backup bus” since missing the usual route by two minutes. Things don’t go well, for right as I am set to cross the street to the stop that very public transit vehicle careens by and is eventually swallowed up by the elongated night’s air; its distant diesel’s rear the only items afoul of its supposed existence.

I walk the additional mile to mile and a quarter of a mile necessary to intersect a route headed where I need to get to get to, that being downtown to transfer to yet another shuttle of sorts I am passed by multiple semi-tractor trailers that make me think twice about traversing this road’s shoulder as I do, watching one such veer over the path by a nice foot or two up ahead over the shoulder’s line.
I finally make it, arriving at the same exact time as a short hooked-nosed woman with dyed and frosted thinning hair and the body shape of a blueberry. She possesses big large round glasses reminiscent of the decade of the 1970’s. She doesn’t like to walk on the grass, or any other surface of organic flora evidenced that she travels around the long way on her thick stubby legs to the stop.

We both are met with a bus going to the University of Washington. The hooked-nosed woman does nothing; I shake my head in the negative to the driver. That first bus moves on, and another follows. This second is the one I need, and the hooked-nosed woman as well. She wedges herself forcefully to get in front of me even though at first she hangs back in avid hesitation.

The hooked-nosed woman takes her time paying the fare, fishing out rumpled bills and a smattering of jangling coins. She even teeters on a decision to take a transfer offered to her by the outstretched hand of the driver, and then finally does after much ridiculous indecision. It is as if her whole existence was made up of one tentative blunder after another.

No matter.

I sit down, open my jacket to let the built-up heat from the walk out, and write in the present tense, mostly the indicative, about this rather random facet.