What will the neighbors think?

I was pretty proud of myself coming home from work today. My homeward route -- good ol' #42 -- requires a two-stop train ride, then a bus, which does a pickup at DART's West Transit Center, a fascinating place I shall have to tell you more about sometime.

I missed the train that would have gotten me to the transit center with time to spare, and the train I boarded meandered up to the dropoff point just as my bus was scheduled to leave the transit center. Fortunately, I remembered the location of the bus' next stop. I speedwalked that way and flagged it down in the nick of time. Sure, it's my daily route and I should know it by now, after riding it for a month. But contingency planning is part of the challenge of city bus riding, and I was happy to have done it successfully.

Since I skipped the gym today, my trip home was a little earlier than normal. I noticed three professionally dressed, white-collar-looking people - two guys and a woman in jackets and collared shirts. One dude even had a tie. Three is a new personal record. (Why does it matter? Not because I want DART buses to look like country clubs. But I've found that in cities with developed, successful mass transit systems, economic diversity is a given.)

On the third-of-a-mile walk home from the bus stop, I heard a voice shouting my name. My landlord was sitting on a neighbor's porch. Eyeing my backpack and my work clothes, he stammered, "What are you- What- Are you just taking a walk?"

He wouldn't be the only Dallasite to fail to comprehend the visual cues. It's just not that normal to see people walking around the neighborhood in office wear. I wonder what went through his mind. What could I have been doing, wandering around a few blocks from my house with a backpack and button-down shirt on? He probably didn't know there was a bus stop nearby. I didn't, until a few weeks ago.