Vignette | De Mon Esprit!

Credible, Decrepit, Pensive.

It had been more than 30 years since I left my hometown.

Frankly, I never expected to return. My folks had died when I was still in my 20s, my sister left the state, and it was just me. There was little to call me back, even though I was still about an hour away from home. Somehow, the adventure gene was one I hadn’t gotten.

Then a group of my friends found me on Facebook. I don’t even know why I signed up. Curiosity, I guess. I reconnected without any desire to come home, or do the reunion thing. In the span of time, 30 years isn’t much, but somehow time had attenuated my memories and the feelings attached to them. So I did a credible job of responding to the “remember whens” and “whatever happened tos” and kept my emotional distance.

Then, about 2 weeks ago, someone posted that the houses on the street where I grew up were about to be demolished. Some developer thought the small town needed a big-box strip mall and they’d chosen that area for it.

So here I was; I sat in the driveway, pensive, with no interest in going further. No one had bothered me – the houses were already empty – and the place I had called home for 22 years was decrepit. The owners who’d had it after my folks died hadn’t taken very good care of it, I thought.

You’re going to call me weird, but I’ve always thought that an abandoned house was one of the saddest things imaginable. When I was a little girl, my grandparents’ house in the country was a target for people who’d decided to dump their unwanted pets. More times than I can count, I remembered a bewildered pet sitting by the side of the road, waiting for a loved person who would never return.

These houses felt the same way to me – as though they wondered what they had done wrong, why their families had left, feeling cold and lonely as the days passed.

I started my car and put it in gear, backing down the driveway and pulling out onto the deserted highway. On an impulse, I tooted the horn as I drove away; I remember, thanks for the memories. So long.

The sullen man next to me on the bus made me uneasy. He was dressed in less-than-clean clothes and didn’t appear to have shaved for about a week. I had the distinct impression (reinforced by his sotto voce mutterings) that he was irrational. I was stuck, though – the seats were full and people jammed the aisles, shifting and dodging in a nearly Brownian motion at each stop. I exchanged a glance, and raised eyebrows, with my other seatmate over the man’s bowed head. The third member of our happy little group was the sullen man’s polar opposite – Hugo Boss, clean-shaven and just, well, clean; he nearly looked like he was spit-shined. Ex-military, I’ll bet, I thought briefly, and pushed aside everything to try to order my workday before I hit my desk.

This was a long ride, all the way down Lakeshore Boulevard and then on the freeway to East Ninth. I’d missed my usual express bus, which got on the freeway right away. I wouldn’t do that again.

The squeal of the doors at yet another stop broke into my reverie. A pretty lady in a business suit and heels got on and shifted into the mass of standees. She was pregnant – at a guess, about five months. She grabbed the overhead bar – which she could just reach – and balanced herself with the briefcase in her other hand.

The spit-and-polish businessman gave her one look – just a glance, really – and went back to his iPad. Just as I was about to stand and offer her my seat, the man next to me beat me to it.

In a gentle voice that I could barely hear over the noise of people’s voices and MP3 players whose earphones leaked a cacophony of music, the man, with a sweet smile that completely changed his face, said “Please, ma’am, have my seat.”

The Allegory of the Long Spoons (look it up) talks about the difference between heaven and hell being that in heaven people feed each other and in hell, they only worry about themselves. For me, from now on, there’s going to be an Allegory of the Bus Seat. And maybe, too, a lesson about impressions and how misleading they can be.