A Bit More Detail

I was riding home, westwards on the westbound Bloor-Danforth line, when the train stopped at Spadina station and two women and their children boarded, one child per mother, and settled down just across from me. The children, one boy and one girl, sat next to each other while their mothers stood across from them, chatting to each other as each held her own beautiful big bouquets of flowers. One of the woman had a knit purse with "El Salvador" stitched into the side.

As I watched the children tug the water-filled vials attached to the stems of those flowers that were sticking out of the plastic wraps, I heard the women hadn't been switching fluently between English and Spanish as they talked to each other. One woman, the taller one, was distracted by her son, who kept asking her for juice, or pop, when they got home.

- Leche or agua.

I was riding north on the Dufferin bus to work this morning. Just a minute before it crossed to Bloor and the Dufferin TTC station, I heard a woman who was standing parallel to the driver, in the aisle, speak.

- Do you want to use your sex life to cover up the archival material?

At first I thought that she was speaking to the driver, but then as she continued I realized that she was off having her own little conversation. We passengers flashed grins at one another.

- Do you really think that you can use your sex life to cover up the archival material?

Descending into the subway, to my delight I found that she was also headng east. So, I boarded her subway car. In the ensuing dialogue, conducted as she spoke into something small that might well have been a recording device, she castigated this person, "a general and a movie star," for being a self-indulgent moral monster. "I think you'd like to use it to put the blame on other people. I think you like that kind of thing." Not to worry since she said that she had "thousands of pictures, all the materials" at hand.

If the woman wasn't recording background material for fiction while peforming impromptu mass-transit theatre, someone should use that material. This is, as a point of fact, one reason I love the TTC: Everyone's on board. I'm just having fun trying to figure out who the protagonists of this conversation could possibly be.

Southbound on the Dufferin bus reasonably late on a week end party night, a more-than-presentable man 40 years old with the simple rectangular wooden head of a cane grasped in his hand on one side of the aisle, an attractive woman in her late 20s wearing a skirt that ran just above her knees on the other.

He was talking to her, politely and with smiles, about a party at a place near me. He named a boutique hotel with a name that's probably excruciatingly familiar to most of the Torontonians reading this post, and went on to talk about how his friend had managed to reserve the place. She smiled back and talked with him, non-commitally but even so.

- You can't come, he said. He's buying a round for everyone, and he gave out tickets before so he wouldn't end up paying for everyone.

He got off shortly afterwards at my stop. I didn't turn to look at the woman.

Before I passed through the turnstile at the Wellesley TTC station, I spilled some change on the dirty tile floor. I cursed as I knelt to pick the coins up.

- Did someone beat you up?

I looked up at to see a guy in his 40s, in winter coat and with thinning light brown hair.

- Well, no.

- Are you sure? I'm a private investigator.

- I'm fine, thanks.

I picked the last dime up, catching it between the fingernails of my thumb and index finger, and smiled quickly at the man.

I was a straphanger last night, riding the Bloor-Danforth line westward to home. I was standing in the back of the back of the car.

Sitting a few seats away from me was a taller man about my age, balding but in good shape. Sitting next to him at an angle was a very attractive woman, her oval face smiling and framed by her highlighted dark hair, wearing a nie cloth coat. She had two grocery bags next to her, the label on a Kellogg's box reading Flocons Givrés through the cheap thin plastic.

"I've moved from Thunder Bay just a month ago," she said to him smiling, "to pursue my dreams of acting and singing." He said something back to her, smiling. They were talking loudly, and I tried not to eavesdrop, but just before the subway came to her stop I did here her say that her name was "Tina, with two 'i's." She waved to him before she left the car quickly.

"She's a keeper, isn't she?" he said to me. I smiled uncomfortably and looked away as he began to write something down on a small notepad that he'd pulled out of his back pocket.