This is a Memoir: Week 1

Every morning, I ride the bus to work, and every evening, I ride it home. And because I am a bus commuter, I frequently experience a phenomena known as, “T Rage.” It begins on a morning like any other. I, and many other commuters, stand waiting for the bus during “peak” hours. I check the tracker on my phone; the next bus will not come for 10 minutes. I tell myself, “It’s all right, the next bus will come.” When it finally arrives at my stop, bodies are pressed against the doors and packed in the aisles like a commuter museum, the text beneath them reading, “These are the unhappy few, who must stand while the bus driver careens down Belmont Street, which hasn’t been repaved in a millenium.” Five minutes later the next bus comes and goes. And the next. And the next.

The caption beneath my own exhibit would read, “Watch as this woman waits for the bus. Notice her reddening face. Notice her shortened breath. Notice her quickened pacing, as she gesticulates madly. This is a woman experiencing ‘T Rage.’”

If I had any real choice in the matter, I would not ride the bus to work during rush hour. I grew up in the suburbs, and for the majority of my conscious youth lived in San Diego, where a car was a necessity, and public transportation was non-existent. Just about to graduate from college and considering grad school in Boston, I visited the city for the first time for 3 days. After witnessing what, in my naivete, I thought was a highly functioning bus and subway system, I sold the car my parents had bought me for my high school graduation to pay off a small portion of my college debt, thus making myself beholden to the whims and wiles of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

There are moments, while waiting for the bus, moments when I am not uncontrollably angry, when I wonder what it would be like to have a car in this city, to be able to get as many groceries as you want, go apple picking on a whim, or drive your friends home late at night because they are the ones without cars (as they’ve been doing for you for the past 10 years). And I think back with surprising longing on the old blue van that was my first four-wheeled love.

When I was 3 years old my parents bought a 1985 powder blue dodge caravan. I have very few early memories, but that van is one of them. In 1991 we drove it across the country when my family moved from Virginia to California, me sitting in the very back with my mom memorizing my new address and phone number. It did not feel like driving home, and it wasn’t. I was 9 years old, being driven toward a new state, a new school, speeding into adolescence, unsure of my body, of the pitch of my voice, of my own likeability. Oddly enough, my skirt on the first day at my new school was also powder blue. I remember standing on the blacktop alone during recess, staring down at it, occasionally eyeing the groups of my peers playing four square, bouncing nonchalant acceptance back and forth to each other over the white lines along with that red plastic ball.

We took that van on about a thousand camping trips. My mom had a National Parks Passport and was hell bent on getting every stamp in that book. To be honest, I didn’t even know what an actual passport looked like until I was 15. We would take road trips to parks around the country, my parents gently ushering my brother and I into the van at 3am so we could sleep for the bulk of the long drives. I remember waking up one morning on the way to Sequoia National Park with the car so full of food and tents and sleeping bags, I couldn’t even dangle my feet. My brother and I sat in the way back, our legs thrown over the seats in front of us, peacefully adjacent for a few long moments as we watched the Southern California skyline pass by at 70 miles per hour.

My brother eventually inherited the caravan. Then he went away to college and the van was finally mine. By this time the air conditioning had gone out and the ceiling fabric was collapsing, ballooning down to touch the heads of my taller passengers. My friend’s mom helped me recover the ceiling in yellow, blue, and red tie dyed fabric using spray adhesive, and I was convinced that van could not be any cooler. We lived in San Diego where the weather was always good and so the windows were always down and the music was always loud and I was young, truly, and every care in the world was eclipsed by a tie dyed ceiling and the possibility for adventure.

Or at least that’s how I like to remember it.

When I was young I was convinced I would never look back on my youth with any nostalgia. I was perpetually looking forward, waiting to be 30, waiting for the time when I too would know how to recover car ceilings and dominate at four square. And now the opposite is true. I find comfort in remembering myself at 16, unaware that driving home from youth group on a warm summer night, the smell of the ocean singing its way into my nostrils, confident that my life was a passenger in that car, moving forward with me on a trajectory towards everything-I'd-ever-wanted-being-mine-- unaware that was the most free I would ever be.

So I stand there waiting at the bus stop, waiting and waiting for something that may or may not come, that may or may not pick me. “You should’ve left earlier," I tell myself, "You are never going to be at work on time; they all hate you there; they hate you because you are always late; because you are a failure, because you fail at all things.” I am out of control, and so I lose all of it. The bus that won’t come becomes everything: the husband I don’t have, the motherhood I might never experience, the body, the money, the safety, the comfort, driving by me, full. “There is not enough room for you,” it calls, “You will never fit.”

This is the frustrating reality of bus riding: sometimes you just have to wait. And sometimes the bus doesn’t come. And sometimes you feel like everyone is getting on, moving forward, arriving on time, while you rage helpless and immobile on some random patch of sidewalk.

But here’s the other thing about the bus: after work, I walk through Harvard Yard, I wait in the Station, and the bus comes quickly as it tends to when I have nowhere to be. It is always crowded, I always feel too big and off balance, dreading the time when I must push through the throngs of bodies to the door, dragging my belongings with me, stepping on toes and inadvertently elbowing old ladies.

But once I am on it, I am, most definitely, on my way home.