One Foot In.

I can see the check engine light from where I am standing. But I don’t mind. It’s not my car. It’s a city bus full of people coming home from the airport. The man next to me tells his cell phone, “I’m coming. I fly out at 6am.” He makes me worry that we are headed back to the airport, rather than away from it. He has small hands and his sneakers are too flat and too clean. That unnerves me, too. He missed his flight out because he was late, but no later than usual, they just changed the rules. His mother is not impressed. He glances at the floor as he hangs up.

A sharp looking man says he knows a whole lot about engineering because he went to engineering school. He is talking to a woman in a black raincoat with a single red line and tiny black and white checks on the fringes and black and white swirly shoes. They want to be Zebra striped shoes, but they somehow are not.

She’s nodding and baring her teeth in a smile shape, but she is somehow not right. Neither of us knows what she’s trying to do in this conversation. But he is feeding off of her, answering questions, becoming more and more dapper with each soggy mile. As she shifts and giggles, his shoulders drop with the soft assurance of superiority.

The bus announces stops. “Next stop Bloor St. West” the automated voice says, next stop Aukland except is says ack like “ack, look out”-land.

And I start to day dream because the bus doesn’t stop at any of the automated stops, even though the stop request light goes on, meaning someone wants to get off. I dream I am getting flushed down a river and the tiny filaments that are supposed to hold me to the rock so that I can feel the rush of the water aren’t strong enough and they are snapping.

I've been in the river since morning. On the way to the airport in Philly, hours ago, my mother said, “He’s afraid of cancer.” She said this almost but not quite with a hint of compassion. And then she became angry again, and said “he never went to visit his mother... he never went to visit his son... “ and then, inevitably... “Or me. well he did visit me. but he didn’t ever want to know anything.”

I considered telling my mother that I was having a biopsy on Monday, but didn’t see the point. It would disturb her. She would wonder why she wasn’t told, and then why she was. After all, how much should she have to endure? There is already my father, with his phony terminal diagnosis and his childish fear of cancer. So I said nothing. And I wondered whether, when I called to say “I’m all clear” or “I will need surgery” she would think back on this rant. But no.

No. No. We don’t think back on conversations and shuffle them into the context of what we now know.

If we did, we would drown in the deep harbor of constant regret. Ack. The things I’ve said. They might have been fine, some of them, if I’d said them to someone else. If I’d known to whom I was speaking.

The bus dropped us at the train, which began at Kipling but didn’t pick anybody up all the way until Jane, giving the airport riders a chance to sink into our seats - like a dull thickening sauce. We will ride it all the way into town. Suddenly, all of us, the sleepy luggage-toting folks who shared the soggy bus, will encounter the high-strung city folk who won’t understand why we would take luggage down town. But we owned this bus at Kipling and Islington and Royal York and Old Mill... we made sense back there.

And I suppose, more or less, that’s how my mother feels. She had a script. She got on a train. We crowded it up and thought we owned it and turned on her and found her sluggish and cold and wait. It doesn’t work. She got on the train with a man she must have- surely - at one point thought she’d love forever. But he drowned himself and kept standing - the undead alcoholic (while the other husbands reformed and re-lived and then died); and now she doesn’t recognize her own surroundings.

I don’t know. But here’s my story: I stepped on to a bus. A man in a pin stripe suit wearing a wedding ring, carrying a long dignified umbrella in the casual grasp of two fingers smiled easily as a short-haired woman with two cats and a small music collection that she mostly received as presents from friends giggled and bared her teeth. She is a smart woman, and the sadness in her eyes is a result of nothing more than filaments that broke away, one by one. She feels their absence, but does not yet know that she is free. And she hasn’t noticed the check engine light. I envy her this.

At Spadina, more people start to enter the train. They hustle in, as if the train might leave without them. They hurry to a seat. They upgrade at the next stop, and soon I will have to close my computer because they will jostle it. Who types on a subway car during rush hour? Hurry finish.

Now we are entertaining Bay station. A drunk leans against the subway wall with odd familiar deliberateness. He might think he’s holding the wall up. He stares at the train. The chime sounds. He has watched everyone board. And then, with a wobbling, careless start, he walks toward the doors. They are starting to close. He has one foot on the train, and one foot on the platform. The lagging foot comes in just as the doors pump once, tap him roughly, and then seal up. He staggers down the aisle as the train lurches forward. We all brace. He plops down dramatically next to a dapper man and says “sorry.” I can barely discern the dapper man explaining that there is no need to apologize. He is transparently graceful, this man. He may be a priest. He may simply be an outsider.

Their mouths move softly until my stop. The dapper man gets up, steps over the drunken old man and politely takes his leave. I look back to see the drunk slumped in his seat.

As I head to the stairs, bound for the bus home, I look back. The doors are just starting to close. The drunk has one foot on the platform, and one foot on the train. I freeze up. The door may catch his jacket, drag him down the platform. The doors pump once, knocking him slightly askew, and he is out. Here, with me.