Bring it

I get to work pretty darn early. My bus picks me up just before 6:30 a.m., and I stumble into work right at 7. Today I had some extra stuff to tackle, so I made my coffee in advance, swayed sleepily in the bathroom as I shaved and dressed, kissed my snoozing wife goodbye on the cheek and was waiting at the bus stop at 6 a.m.

My normal traveling companions on the #42 route are a quiet bunch. One guy who boards a few stops after me sits near the front, across from where I sit, in the long benches normally reserved for the handicapped, and chats with the bus driver, a normally reticent woman whom I've only recently trained to respond with a curt "hi" when I say good morning. The portly woman who sits in that same spot when I get on the bus, and who leaves before talky guy gets on, likes to sit sideways on the bench with her feet propped up, slumping with a dour expression on her face. Those are my liveliest co-riders.

So I was surprised at the jovial spirit of the riders on the 6 a.m. route. They all seemed to know each other, and they were ready to talk to sports. The Stars had lost another thriller, complete with an almost-score that didn't quite cross the goal line, so there was that to debate. And, of course, there was the argument over whether the Mavericks were right to sit their starters in a game against a probable playoff opponent, which naturally transitioned into talk over who would be the easiest team to smack down in the first round. (The answer is the Lakers, but the top seed in the NBA shouldn't have a problem with any of them, even if the Warriors swept the regular season games. Fluke.) I was happy to see these guys getting worked up about their teams, filling each other in on the details most had missed because they all have to go to sleep so early.

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.