Citizens of 4F, June 10, 2014

On the 4F bus this morning, I see an unusually large number of Pin-Twit Faces.

The hybrid buses that are now the norm in Minneapolis are configured so the back third of the vehicle is raised above the front, creating the space that houses the huge electric batteries for the bus. When you sit near the front of this rear platform, you can look down majestically on the front 2/3 of the bus and the passengers who sit there.

This morning, at least nine Pin-Twits sitting ahead of me spend the 35-minute bus ride with thumbs in frantic navigation on smart phones, checking their Pinterest, their Twitter, their Facebook feeds and who knows what else. Their free hands usually grip a Starbucks iced coffee, while the opposing thumb goes through frantic calisthenics that amaze me. Social media platforms seem to spring up daily, and I can no longer keep up with them. Our social media person in the marketing department at the office told me recently that Instagram and Google-plus are the coming rage....I have no idea what they are, really,  but the combined arsenal of all the social media platforms is certainly enough to occupy this group on the bus this morning.

I try not to be judgmental about this, but of course can't help myself. I'm now at that age where I sense that personal growth is more about emptying myself of irrelevant data and knowledge to make room for something more meaningful, and I can't help but wonder if in 20 years or so these 20- and-30 something adults might be in the same boat. Is the difference between these young adults and old geezers like me a cultural thing, an age thing, or merely a temperamental difference? Approaching 59 years of age, I'm aware that statistically I will likely be present for perhaps 25 or 35 more of these brief Minnesota springs, and I find myself paying very close attention to them. I can't imagine the appeal of burying myself never-ending Facebook feeds on a smart phone while spring passes me by outside.

But I'm aware that young adults are wired a little differently due to being raised with this technology. My daughter electronically multi-tasks like a bandit, and seems to be entirely well-adjusted and happy in life. She knows far more than I did at that age. And who am I to say that being connected to the entire world is somehow less valid than a narrower connection to the immediate environment? Years ago during one of the NASA missions, I realized that I could pull up a live image of the surface of Mars on my phone whenever I wanted. Certainly there is magic in being connected to the entire world whenever you want. Maybe it's just not my temperament to need or want this.

I have fair amount of digital savvy for an old geezer, but there's no way I could pull off what my daughter does, nor would I want to. There are moments when work pressures force me to be connected to email at all hours, and it's not a good thing for me. Clearly I am constructed to be happier when unconnected; I think this is more true for our generation than for this younger crowd, but perhaps even more for me individually.

Just below me, a young woman has a right thumb of Olympic talent. As I secretly glance over her shoulder, she goes through Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and several other media platforms, scrolling so fast that the screen is a blur.  Periodically she tries to shut the phone off, but after a few seconds is drawn back to it. At one point, I'm fascinated to see her scroll through at least 50 photos of the British princess. Outside the bus on Bryant Avenue, I see a front garden where a clever gardener has planted Siberian iris among the huge blue leaves of a hosta I recognize as Elegans, thereby creating what appears to be a new species. It is something I might try myself. To me, this is the real thing, but I'm quite sure if I pointed it out to the young woman, she'd see the Princess as a far more relevant thing.

Each to their own, I guess. But I can't help wondering what a 90-year old addicted to social media will look like. Years from now, I suppose our nursing home will be filled with oldsters with huge oversized tablets so that they can study images of a decrepit old Queen of England.

Citizens of 4F: May 22, 2014

Danno is never, ever a passenger on the 4F morning commuter bus into downtown Minneapolis, but he is one of our citizens just the same. For a couple of years now, we've see him three or four times a month walking along the west-side sidewalk of Lyndale Avenue  between 26^th St. and Franklin Avenue at 6:30 or 7:00 am.  He’s a young man somewhere between 25 and 30 years of age, short in height and quite thin. His ethnic background seems rooted in the south Pacific—you see traces of Polynesia, Samoa or maybe the Philippines in his features.

This stretch of Minneapolis is a transition zone between well-kept turn-of-the-century single family homes of south Minneapolis and the downtown proper. It’s a stretch of mostly apartment buildings, some of them run-down enough to bring the term “tenement” to mind. This is a relative term, though. People in real cities like Chicago or St. Louis would be amused that we see this stretch of Minneapolis as a gritty segment of inner city. It is by no means a slum. The people who live here are a mixed group. Some are young adults who like living between the action of downtown and the trendiness of the Uptown district. Some are students commuting to the downtown community vocational college or the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  A few, though, are folks living more on the fringe of the mainstream, young men and women who have dropped out by choice or by circumstance. 

Most mornings, a quick glance at Danno suggests that he lives more on the fringe. Usually he’s weary, unshaven, irritable in demeanor. His beard brings to mind early Bruce Springsteen, but unintentionally so. You get the sense most days that 7:00 am is the end of his evening, not the start of his day, and “disheveled” is the term that usually comes to mind when you spot Danno in the early morning. He stands out because he's unusual in that regard. 

Not always, though, because Danno is a mercurial character. I’ve also seen him on mornings where he carries books under his arm while striding purposefully along the early morning pavement. One day, he was carrying a gleaming steel coffee mug in one hand and a copy of the New York Times tucked under the other elbow, and could have been a young professional enjoying the early morning before showering and heading to a downtown office.

Today, though, Danno was in a borderline state, and he was in trouble. Heading north along Lyndale Avenue, he could not walk straight, and his manner suggested more than mere alcohol inebriation. He was wearing black Converse tennis shoes, green camouflage military trousers rolled up to mid calf, and a dark grey tank top T-shirt not at all appropriate for the 40-degree morning. While walking, he looked into the sky in confusion a couple of times, weaved once onto the lawn of an apartment building, compensated and stumbled onto the grassy boulevard between sidewalk and street. It’s very hard to say what was happening with him, though he looked to me like people I've seen under heavy, dangerous doses of major-league hallucinogens. 

Then one of those sensory portraits presented itself that I knew was going to stick in my mind for a while. As the bus passed by, Danno stumbled along the sidewalk, and fell hard headfirst into the trunk of a flowering crab apple tree that had blanketed the sidewalk and boulevard with a thick quilt of its flower petals, a layer of blossoms so bright in the morning sun that the colors hurt your eyes. 

Danno seemed not to be seriously hurt, and too confused to even be embarrassed. He momentarily tried to get back to his feet, but then surrendered to whatever alien force was surging through his veins and brain synapses, and curled up in a partial fetal pose on the ground His right arm, bent at the elbow, supported his head and neck, a posture of sleep. The young man's  legs and hip were on the sidewalk, his torso and upper body sprawled onto the grassy boulevard, and his dark skin and clothes were in striking contrast to the bed of pale magenta flowers on which he lay. Passersby sidestepped him while pretending not to see the anomaly.  

As we passed by, the signature to this portrait came as a whiff of flowering apple perfume cascaded through the open window of the bus.  

It was all disturbingly, ironically, beautiful. 

Citizens of 4F, January 14, 2014

The 4F commuter bus presents a pretty representative sample of the Minneapolis demographic from the hours of 7:00 am to 9:00, and from 4:00 to 7:00 pm each day—the rush hour windows. In the morning, for example, the passengers on any given bus might include:  high school students wearing school letterman jackets as they head to De Lasalle high school; students from the art and design college who often defiantly omit hats and scarves even on very cold days; day laborers with worn, slightly grimy canvas jackets headed for the temp labor agencies on Lake Street; attractive young men and women in nice clothes,  eagerly pursuing entry level white-collar jobs in their hopes of one day becoming members of the last type of bus commuter—the older executives with long woolen overcoats and expensive leather gloves and briefcases, carrying Wall Street Journals tucked under their arms.

On any given morning, about 60% of the faces are familiar to me; the rest are infrequent or one-time riders, on the bus that morning because a car has failed to start in the frigid weather, or because they're riding to connect with the light rail train line running to the airport.

Fairly often, you also see one or two or even three members of another demographic—adults who appear to have some kind mild disabilities and special needs—adults who are traveling either from family homes or group residential facilities to occupational jobs in downtown. A friend of mine who managed one of these non-profit organizations that help find jobs for special-needs adults has told me that most do indeed commute into downtown via bus each morning. This morning on the 4F,  there was a new passenger fitting this demographic, who I think of as "Charles."

Charles sits at the front of the bus, gripping the side rail tightly with one hand while the other hand pinches his bus transfer with the thumb and forefinger. Charles is about 60 or 65 years old, with a two-day stubble beard that is not a fashion statement. His large, aviator-rimmed glasses don't fit very well and they keep sliding down his nose. At every street corner, Charles nervously leans up out of his seat to check the street sign. In the end, he'll do this for 55 consecutive blocks, since he doesn't get off until the heart of downtown. Periodically he looks up across the aisle at the row of lighted advertisement panels lining the top of the bus; he shifts his head up and down, trying to navigate the line in his bifocals, uncertain of which magnification to use for reading at this distance.

Charles wears new jeans, a crisp flannel plaid shirt, Nike tennis shoes, and a green nylon parka that is vaguely military in style, like the parkas you see on workers on outposts at the south pole. It is the type clothing that few people of Charles' age would pick for themselves, and it hints that Charles has somebody in his life that cares enough to pick out clothes for him to wear. Perhaps it is some kind of professional guardian, but maybe he's lucky enough to have a family member who serves this role. His jacket is wide open, though, and periodically it slides down his arms and back so that he has to shrug it up into place again. He doesn't seem to know anybody else on the bus, and as new passengers board, he looks at each of them with great interest.

When special-needs adults ride the bus, they almost always sit at the front of the bus, sometimes looking a little fearful, especially when the bus ride has not become a routine habit. Many years ago, I recall that kids with special needs riding the school bus always huddled in the front of the bus, too. There was a reason for it then, because kids can be profoundly unkind, and a special-needs kid who found himself at the back of the bus might experience some type of teasing or torment at the hands of other, some yelling the word "retard." We tend to romanticize the qualities of children, but the truth is that they are often cruel, and it's fortunate that as a species we tend to become kinder and more compassionate as we grow older. I find myself wondering if the reason Charles and others like him still ride at the front of the bus as grown adults is because they have ingrained memories of those earlier, harsher times.  We are all creatures of habit, and we all relive old experiences in our behavior without even really knowing that we're doing it.

As the bus pulls up to his stop and Charles starts to stand, his jacket is wide open, and a nearby woman starts to reach out to help zip it up for him. Then she catches herself and leans back with obvious embarrassment; she's probably not certain whether such an overture would seem welcome to Charles, or insulting or threatening.

So Charles' parka hangs wide open, and twice slips down his shoulders to his elbows as he trudges up 5th Street in an easterly direction. He's quickly covered with snow that looks like powdered sugar. Blowing snow is falling heavily, but fortunately the temperatures have moderated this week, and instead of -22, the air is a relatively normal 25 degrees.

Provide his walk is not too far, Charles will be fine.

Citizens of 4F, December 30, 2013

This was an unusual day for 3-year-old Frankie, a regular passenger on the morning north-bound 4F bus into downtown Minneapolis.

Frankie and his mother board the bus near the start of its run, in the inner ring suburb of Richfield, and so they are already seated when the bus reaches my stop, which is at the point where the bus just enters crosses the city boundary into  Minneapolis proper on its morning run into downtown. 

Today was different because Frankie was a happy child,  an unusual state of affairs for him. After many dozens of mornings watching him and his young mother, I've concluded that Frankie probably lives with one of the conditions commonly identified as being on the austism/asberger's spectrum. My wife, who worked in the public school system, tells me that it's now the standard theory that attention-deficit disorders also are related to this spectrum, so I'm assuming at the very least, Frankie suffers from a very severe case of attention deficit. 

On most days, his face wears a constant expression of troubled consternation, as though he lives in perpetual conflict with his own nature. Looking out the window of the bus offers him no more than a few seconds of focus, and neither can he be occupied with any of the books or games that his mother provides him on the bus ride. His squirming is constant, and it is rare that he is at peace for more than a few seconds at a time. He is really not disruptive to other passengers, but neither is his mother ever able to do anything but tend his constant needs. His little forehead is almost always furrowed in emotional discomfort.

His mother is very young—certainly no more than 20 or 21, and perhaps even younger, and it's to her credit that I've never seen her lose her temper with Frankie. She is so young that it's possible the Aladdin backpack she carries with Frankie is not her son's at all, but is an artifact of her own recent childhood. 

Today, though, Frankie is for the first time a bit more like other little boys. This morning is the exception that proves the rule.  Beneath his parka, he wears a tee-shirt that says "Hey Dude, Your Girlfriend Keeps Checking Me Out," Frankie sits on his mother's lap facing backwards toward me; I'm two rows behind them.  When Frankie catches my eye, he begins to play the familiar hide-and-seek game that's common to most kids.  He moves his head behind his mother, blocking his view of me, then pops his head back to see me once again.  As soon as my eyes shift back to meet his again, he breaks into a quietly delighted smile.  It pleases him enormously to see our shared recognition of one another. 

The game goes on for nearly 15 minutes—a period of focus virtually unheard of for Frankie. When Frankie and his mother get up to leave the bus at the Lake St. connection, she glances back and smiles at me.  It pleases her to see Frankie occasionally behave like a typical child; it may give her hope for his future. Frankie, too, smiles at me over his Mom's shoulder as they leave the bus, and I wonder if he will develop the skill to remember these occasional calm moments at those frequent times when his awareness again begins to vibrate out of control. 

Citizens of 4F, December 17, 2013

Sylvia is one of those people who is either blessed or cursed (depending on your view) by being born without the gene for social restraint.

Her work schedule often puts her both on the same inbound morning bus and the same outbound evening bus as me, and so I see a lot of Sylvia. She is a slightly round woman with longish hair, somewhere in her late 30s, wearing large round eyeglasses that would seem more appropriate on an older woman.  When I first started observing her, I thought that perhaps Sylvia had been riding for many, many years, since many people on the bus seemed to be close friends of hers. I quickly saw, though Sylvia is just one of those people who will tell anything and everything, to almost anyone, any time, any where. The people she talked to so openly weren't close friends at all. She just doesn't have any sense of social restraint at all when it comes to talking with strangers.

If you find yourself sitting next to Sylvia, usually it's only a matter of a moment or two until she turns in her seat, leans forward, and enters into a spirited, if somewhat one-sided, conversation with you.

It would be rather easy to simple label Sylvia as a sadly lonely woman who talks to bus people because she has no one else in the world to converse with. She seems more complicated than that, though, because judging from her conversation, it appears that her management job at the bank entails a fair amount of responsibility and routine interaction with others seems to be something she's good at.

Sylvia will describe every aspect of her life to the people around her on the bus, and she does so in a voice that carries pretty much throughout the vehicle. For several consecutive mornings recently, she described the office intrigue that went along with her yearly performance review at work. (She was not viewed positively by her supervisor, who dislikes single women, we're told.) Her principle audience for this conversation was the monkish Thomas, an elderly gentleman who very politely listened, nodded, even offered an occasional word of encouragement.

On another morning, a woman (and everybody else) was treated to a pretty detailed description of Sylvia's extended family, some of whom live in the area, others as far way as Seattle. She is particularly close to her half-brother; doesn't much care for her sister, even though she is a full sibling.

Not everybody listens politely. Some newcomers to the bus shift uncomfortably when Sylvia begins to talk directly to them, and a few even get up to change seats. For those who have been around a while, though, Sylvia no longer draws any attention. She is just one of the gang, although a little eccentric. We know lots and lots about her, even though we've never heard her actually give her name.

Much of the time, Sylvia just describes the minutia of her life in pretty exhaustive detail. Occasionally, however, a bit of philosophy falls out of the sky, apropos of nothing else that's been going on at all. This morning, Sylvia was unusually silent for most of the ride into downtown. It wasn't until the final passengers boarded the bus when only standing room remained, that Sylvia finally spoke, boldly:

"If you've decided to change yourself because of somebody else, it never works," she said to everyone on the bus. "The only reason to change if for yourself, and yourself alone."

Citizens of 4F, Dec. 10, 2013

On some mornings, every citizen who boards the 4F bus seems to wear the basic pain of living on his or her face.

Tom, the bus driver, nervously taps the steering wheel constantly; he's obsessed with hitting the scheduled time to each bus stop,  because passengers depend on him to deliver them on time each morning to their bus connections or to their work place. He takes this very seriously and his pain comes from the expectation he places on himself. When passengers thank him for the ride (in Minnesota, virtually everybody does this), Tom will genuinely appreciate the courtesy.

Frank has serious physical disabilities. He can board the bus only when the power lift door is dropped to the sidewalk so he can roll his hi-tech wheelchair aboard. The only muscle Frank seems able to use is the one hand that operates the joystick on his wheelchair. His huge pain lies in his complete lack of independent autonomy; he depends on the bus driver to walk back and cinch his wheelchair in place, and to free him once he reaches his stop.  Frank's pain is of the type we'd like to avoid thinking about, except on days like this when it's not possible to ignore.

Bonnie's pain is much less obvious, but it's there. She is a stunningly pretty girl, and the burden of being pretty shows on her face. When people glance at her, she shifts uneasily, unsure about how exactly she is being perceived. Sometimes she reacts to glances by smoothing her hair, dabbing at her lipstick; she seems convinced that others are staring at flaws. She faces great pressure to be pretty all the time, and at unguarded moments this pressure shows in her face. It's rather mild pain compared to that of others, but it's there nonetheless. 

Tom is a young, budding middle-manager aiming for an executive role some day, some place. The work badge he clips to his briefcase is for an investment firm now in serious financial trouble like so many others. Tom rides with eyes closed, and sometimes his lips move silently. He is practicing for some upcoming morning meeting, where the success of his performance perhaps will affect the security of his job.

Margaret is an older citizen, perhaps 70 years of age, and like many of the older folks, her pain is of a physical variety. She winces noticeably upon boarding the bus, and the wince is echoed whenever the bus lurches. Perhaps it is arthritis, or perhaps some other nerve problem, but either way her pain is evident. Like so many elderly folks, Margaret handles her pain with quite a lot of dignity.

All the 4F citizens show pain in some form on this cold, cold morning—every last one of them. And while there will be other mornings where I will be more attuned to their happiness, today it is their sorrows that touch me.  Strangely, this makes me feel a closeness and bond with my fellow citizens that is impossible otherwise. Their pain seems to scrape against my own nerve endings today, yet for this moment I would have it no other way.

Later today, I might find myself adopting indifference, or even irritation, in order to insulate myself from empathetic pain.  In the early morning, though, there is a still a softness of heart that makes all of us hurt together, a human communion. 

Citizens of 4F, Sept. 19, 2013

Frank is a common though infrequent passenger on the morning 4F bus into downtown Minneapolis. In his mid 60s, Frank gives the impression of a somewhat borderline existence—not homeless exactly, but living on the fringe of mainstream culture nonetheless. His grey hair is longish, a little unkempt. His stubble beard comes and goes, but he seems not to shave religiously; whole weeks go by sometimes in which the stubble grows unchecked. His standard clothing includes boots, faded demin jeans, and a demin jacket that is several shades more faded than the jeans. He very often gets off the bus at Lake Street, and as he wanders up the street as the bus pulls away, his destination seems aimless.

I see him often, but not until today are my assumptions about him substantiated. When he sits directly in front of me today on the bus, I notice that the adjustment band on the back of his red baseball cap had a single word printed on it: "Veteran."

During my teenage and young adult years, my country's war "du jour"  was the Vietnam War (ridiculously, the official policy wonks tried to tell us this was just a "conflict", not a war). Conflict or war, this event influenced the atmosphere of those years like nothing else before or since. Without any proof at all, I would have bet money that Frank was an armed forces veteran of that conflict, because the wearied, cynical look he carries with him is one I've seen many times in the men who participated in that war in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I am slightly too young (and probably too cowardly) to have served even if my luck had been awful, but I have friends and acquaintances who served. And I did have a draft card and a lottery number when I was a senior in high school, before the war ended in the early 1970s, much to my enormous relief, so the war was certainly a big part of my psyche, my country's psyche.

Although the early decades of this century have seen ongoing military conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's been something much different about those conflicts when compared to Vietnam. These recent wars have not dominated the moods and conversation of my own kids the way Vietnam did for us, for one thing.  For us back in the day, the war was nearly as important as sports and sex, and almost no day went by that we didn't talk about and argue about the events of southeast Asia. The 6:00 pm news in the evening, with its daily body count, was watched as intently as any network situation comedy.

No such obsession occurred for my own kids as regards today's global conflicts, even though they are the same age as I was at that time. And it's not as though my own kids are apolitical. My daughter, especially, has a very high level of political awareness. The fact is that Vietnam was simply different as a cultural phenomenon, occupying a position in the national psyche different than any conflict before or since. WW 1 and 2 were somewhat noble wars where we felt like we were fighting legitimate evil. And although there is rightful cynicism about the Bush- and Obama-era conflicts, the fact that they were (are) being fought by a volunteer army puts in in a different category than Vietnam, which was fought mostly by drafted conscripts forced into service.

To this day, a group of Vietnam vets participating in a civic parade or other public event has a different air about them than that of Korean vets or gulf war vets, or the handful of old men still living from World War II and able to march in parades.  At the last Veteran's Day parade I saw, when the Vietnam vets paraded by, they were dressed in their informal combat gear rather than dress uniforms, and sported long hair, beards, and very often a kind of defiantly outraged expression, even now, 40 years later.

And it's something of a national tragedy to recognize how many of our older homeless and indigent men trace their roots back to the Vietnam war. If you pay homage to the Vietnam war memorial in Washington DC, you very likely will pass by homeless Vietnam vets sleeping on park benches or in the parks; and you may find small groups protesting their societal treatment right in the shadows of the noble monuments of the national mall. Most bear the same look that Frank of the 4F bus does, just to a greater degree.

While all war veterans are often reluctant to talk about their experiences, the Vietnam vets I know are singularly close-mouthed about discussing their experiences with anyone not sharing similar memories. I worked with a close colleague for several years before he confided that he'd been a Vietnam veteran, and this even though he'd never been in combat at all but had served instead as a PR journalist. There is a mixture of embarrassment and fierce anger in many of the Vietnam veterans I've known personally. I've met and know at least six veterans who saw infantry or airborne combat action in Vietnam, and while they will openly talk about intensely personal matters involving family or marriage issues, not one of them ever has talked about combat experiences.

I am stereotyping Vietnam vets, I know, and I apologize for it. It won't surprise me at all if some readers of this essay become very angry at my depiction, and point out that the vast majority of vietnam vets aren't traumatized at all. They are undoubtedly correct about this.  But in all honesty that's how society thinks of Vietnam veterans as a group—as a demographic abandoned, demeaned by their culture, and rightfully angry about it. The perception, whether accurate or not, is its own reality.

I very much hope our current group of emerging war veterans from the Gulf conflicts manage to avoid the same treatment and fate seen in so many Vietnam vets, as well as the stereotyping with which we clothe them.  But given the long, long length of the various Gulf wars, and modern medicine's ability to salvage seriously injured and even brain-damaged soldiers, I fear that 40 years from now, the plight of war vets as a group may be even worse than those of my contemporaries.

Recently I spent many hours at our local VA hospital as my father-in-law, a WW II vet, had heart bypass surgery, and in the waiting rooms and cafeteria,  I was struck by the enormous number of young vets under the age of 40 who bore the early traces of the haunted look you now see in the faces of some Vietnam-era veterans.

I can't help but wonder if 30 years from now we won't see a far larger group of traumatized veterans struggling to find a place in a society that is embarrassed to acknowledge its own failings. Such an outcome seems possible unless as a matter of policy we treat this group better than we treated the Vietnam vets who served us in the 1960s and 70s.

Citizens of 4F: June 28, 2013

During the spring, when I sat on left (east) side of the 4F bus in the morning as it traveled into downtown,  I frequently saw Sally on her bicycle at the corner of 42 st. and Bryant Avenue, Sally looked to be about 12 or 14 years old, and when I saw her she was usually paused at the curb straddling her bike, waiting for traffic to clear so she could cross.  Presumably she was heading to school.

Sally rides one of the old-fashioned bikes for girls, with the dropped front cross bar designed for easy use by girls. These bikes are somewhat rare these days, as most bicycling girls ride standard 10-speed or 15-speed bikes with the straight crossbar. But this type of traditional girl's bike is very helpful for Sally, because she is particularly tiny of stature.

Sally is very short for her age, although her facial features and arms and legs are fairly average in shape,  Sally's genetic condition makes her what political correctness now calls a "little person."  Some years ago we would have called this condition dwarfism. So the this bike is particularly useful for Sally, since a traditional bicycle would be difficult indeed for her to ride comfortably.

Sally's facial expression most mornings is one of melancholia, so often that  on the rare occasion when some private thought makes her look happy, it stands out as the exception to the rule. It makes me wonder at the reasons for the sad expression she wears nine days out of ten.

Is Sally simply one of those people who takes a while to wake up in the morning?  Will she grow steadily cheerier as the day goes on, as is the case with some people? Is she simply glum about going to school on nice spring days?  That's not usually in healthy young adolescents. Do I pay more attention to her because of her physical unusualness?  Is she really just like everybody else? After all, when people don't know you're looking at them, the expression you see is usually one of worried consternation, if not outright unhappiness. Members of the human species rarely look happy when viewed in social isolation.

What I imagine, though, is that her unusual condition creates a special isolation for Sally. Dwarfism, I've read, is a steadily decreasing phenomenon, which means those living with it have steadily fewer genuine peers. Sally is much more unusual now than she would have been 20 years ago, and perhaps it's the fact that she alway draws second looks that creates her melancholia. What teenager, except for cheerleaders and performance athlete, likes to be stared at? In the dozens of days I've seen Sally on the street, she has never looked up at the bus as it passes; she doesn't need to, because she knows full well that people above notice her and swivel their necks to keep looking as the bus passes.

I wonder if Sally, as she enters her teen years, will have a particularly difficult time developing relationships. Is this part of what's on her mind in the mornings? It would take a particularly mature  and sensitive male teenager to look past Sally's physical condition to the possibilities of romance. Mature and sensitive teenage boys aren't exactly common. Sally almost certainly will feel more isolation than most teenagers in this regard.

Suddenly one day Sally stopped appearing at the corner in the morning, and for a brief time I was worried about her—until I realized that the school year had ended and she no longer had the need to venture out early each morning. When school starts in the fall, Sally may well have now moved on to high school that requires a different bike route, so it's entirely possible I won't ever see her again.

But I'll continue to wonder how she's doing.

Citizens of 4F, June 20, 2013

Ned is an older gentleman, perhaps 70 or 75. He is lean, quick and lithe as he boards the bus, with no evidence of arthritic joints. He wears with a long full beard and dresses in expensive casual clothes. Now that the weather is warm he frequently wears a crisp long-sleeved button-down shirt, sleeves carefully folded up to mid forearm, under a high-quality trout fisherman's vest. Perhaps he has actually done some fly fishing in his day, but I don't think so. This vest, at least, seems to be more fashion statement than practical garment. I would guess he likes the outdoors, but perhaps more as a hiker or birdwatcher than as an active fisherman.

His trousers are carefully pressed khaki of a color that exactly matches his vest, and his footwear is clearly expensive, walking shoes of supple brown leather. Upon boarding the bus, he immediately switches to a pair of reading glasses, his hands very precise as he dons the reading glasses, tosses the lanyard over his head and carefully folds his other glasses and places them in his shirt pocket. His hands draw your attention; old hands but flexible and quick, without age spots or serious wrinkles. A man who has used his hands for finely detailed work; not muscular labor.

He immediately takes a book from his bag; it is a good quality illustrated book, and from my vantage point appears to be a book of color prints from modernistic art done in the 1930s or thereabout. There is precision about the way Ned turns the pages; his hands are elegant and careful, and I wonder if he might be a retired art director or graphic designer. The fact that his book carries the stamp of the public library supports the possibility that he's retired and on fixed income, as does the fact he's riding the public bus. His clothes and book bag are clearly quite expensive, though, and were perhaps purchased at a more affluent time in life.

Other days have supported my hunch about his artistic background; sometimes Ned pulls a sketch book from his bag and quietly sketches quick profiles of the passengers around him with a charcoal pencil to pass the time on the bus ride into downtown.

One morning I decided to stop a few blocks early in downtown to get coffee at a favorite shop, and realized that Ned is already in line ahead of me. He was obviously a regular (the fact that the shop owner greeted him familiarly is the reason I know Ned's name), and I began to get a mental picture of what Ned's days might be like. A leisurely start at the coffeeshop, followed by a stroll to the public library for a scholarly few hours, and then perhaps lunch with old colleagues at a former office or a walk along the shady Mississippi riverfront before taking the bus back home in the afternoon.

Much to envy there.

Citizens of 4F: June 4, 2013

Now that the spring has finally come to Minneapolis, new characters have reemerged on the early hours of morning in downtown. I sometimes see them on those mornings where I go to the office very early.

On mornings when I exit the 4F bus near my office shortly after dawn, they rise ghost- like from the freight track canyon that runs into the east side of downtown from the north and south. Sometimes it is literally up from the mists they rise, one, two or sometimes three purposeful, mysterious human figures. Where these wanderers are going is unclear, though logical destinations might be the either the downtown bus depot  or perhaps the industrial area that blankets the gritty midway zone between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The midway district is where other freight train highways come in and out of the metro area.

It's not exactly fair to think of them as hobos or tramps, because they look a little more like modern cowboys, with their jeans and boots and stetson hats. But it's clear they carry all their worldly belongings in expensive but well-worn backpacks as they drift across the countryside. They are indeed homeless, but homeless in a much different way than the unfortunate, often mentally-ill beggers you see more frequently on  city streets everywhere.

These modern nomads are simply dressed but manage to stay relatively clean and neat in appearance, and the odor you catch as you pass them on the street isn't unpleasant at all: they smell like the prairie, like the desert, like the alfalfa fields. They carry the atmosphere of wherever they've just come from. And unlike the unfortunate street beggars, who don't really look at you at all unless they're actively pleading for coins, these fellows have a slightly jaunty, fearless air about them. They stride the streets with shoulders back and wide, and they will meet your glance willingly.

It seems unfair to even think of them as drifters, as there is nothing shiftless about the purposeful pace with which they march across the city in the early mornings. I always imagine that they are migrating across the land following seasonal work patterns, but I don't know for sure. Some may be headed for work up for that recent mecca—the new oil-field bonanza in North Dakota. By 7:00 am, they will have vanished; like rare birds, they are visible only in the early hours.

One morning as I turn the corner for the final leg up First Avenue to my office in the Wyman Building, one of these fellows tips his Stetson in greeting as he passes me on the street. "'Ello there, friend," he says to me in a slightly sing-song voice . "Isn't it just a fine morning, then?" There is no trace of irony. He's indeed simply pleased to be roaming on foot on a fine early June morning, happy to be just about as free as is humanly possible.

It's the Scottish brogue that causes me to pause a few steps later and look back at him as he pauses at

the intersection. He's waiting for the green light in order to cross the street legally, even though there is nary a vehicle to be seen at that hour.  How, I wonder, did this fellow make his way from a distant British nation to our city?

In my mind's ear, I've been giving them all the drawl of the American Southwest. But the fact that all along I've been imagining this incorrectly makes the world seem all the richer, somehow. Fiction just isn't nearly as fine as a full experience of the here and now.  

Citizens of 4F, April 29, 2013

Minneapolis folks are a little confused today, weatherwise, and it’s easy to understand why. Within the space of 10 days we’ve had a major 12-inch winter storm snow, then some warm days culminated by a two delicious weekend days of 80 degrees. The citizens of the 4F bus into downtown Minneapolis this morning reflected that confusion, with garb ranging from cutoff shorts, tanktop T-shirts and open sandals (the kids heading for DeLaSalle high school on Nicollet island), to gloves and scarves (some of the older professionals heading for the downtown offices).

Danny seems confused in a slightly different way. Probably in his early 60s, he doesn’t fit into any of the standard downtown stereotypes. On the surface, he projects a kind of western cowboy appearance, with a Stetson hat and rust-colored canvas barn coat. It’s not quite consistent, though, as he also wears what appears to be older negative heel shoes (we used to call them Earth shoes, in my day), aviator-style wire-rimmed glasses, and newer JC Penny denim jeans (not Wranglers, not even Levis). His sand-colored hair is longish under the stetson, and his short beard is a mixture of white and buff, like the remnants of a small wood fire that leaves its white ashes mixed among the coarse sands on a beach.

Most unusual is the plastic covering for his Stetson, which fits like some kind of shower-cap, with an elastic band the snugs it up under the brim. Real cowboys, I'm told, will wear such a raincoat for their treasured stetsons on stormy days. But it's bright sun in Minneapolis today, and this covering looks like it is worn permanently on Danny's hat.  On the top surface of the hat’s brim, the plastic fits tight and smooth, almost like it’s been glued in place, but on the upper dome of the hat, there is too much plastic and it bunches loosely around the dome of the Stetson: I can’t help but think of the image of an extra-large Trojan condom being worn by a man who really needs the standard size. 

It’s very hard to gauge Danny’s story, though he projects the energy of someone a little down on his luck. I find myself wondering if the entire outfit is simply what he was able to find at some second-hand store recently. When the seat next to him gets taken as the bus fills up, Danny looks steadfastly out the window in embarrassed shyness, away from his seat companion, for the rest of the trip. And my hunch that he doesn’t fit the downtown society is right; he gets off the bus on Franklin Avenue well before downtown, a street dominated on this stretch by bars, soup kitchens, day labor offices, check-cashing shops and other businesses serving the edges of society.

It’s too far from my own office and would cause me to be late for work to do so, but I’m tempted to follow Danny to obtain clues to a little bit more of his story. But I think somehow that he has troubles enough, without adding a strange middle-aged guy stalking him on Franklin Avenue at 7:00 am in a monday morning. 

As I watch him walk up the street, Danny hobbles just a little, but his steps are quick and he's making good time. As he reaches a gap between two building, full daylight fall upon him, and a beam of sunlight gleams off the plastic covering of his Stetson. Not a real cowboy maybe, but Danny has every right to the same springtime sunshine that favors us all. 

Citizens of 4F

—publisher's note:  "Citizens of 4F" was a running feature penned by Mercurious in a previous life for another little-read digital magazine.  This episode is a new introduction to that series, which features a series of personality profiles, real and projected, of the people Mercurious encounters on his daily commuter bus rides (the 4F line) between residential south Minneapolis and the downtown business district—


Gladys is a passenger I see both on the 7:00 am bus into downtown as well as the 5:45 bus out of downtown, maybe 4 days out of every 5 days that I ride. Recently, she has changed her behavior in a very noticeable way.

Now, people in general, and bus commuters in particular, are creatures of habit. Over the years, it has become common for me on the morning ride to take the window seat on the right side of the bus, four rows back from the front. At the first day, this was really just because the spot happened to be open, and as it subsequently was open most every morning, it grew to be became "my spot."

It offered certain advantages, because, as you've noticed, I'm a snoopy observer, and this seat lets me clearly see a good number of regular riders at the front of the bus.  It's this vantage that has allowed me to say, with authority, that approximately 40% of Minneapolis bus commuters bide their bus time reading books—a number that makes us considerably more literate than the US norm.  And I also know, with some authority, that of this number, E-book readers make up half (or 20% of the total ridership) and that novels are the the literary snack of choice.

Gladys is one of these literate bus commuters.  She is of modest means, as her clothes, shoes, and hairstyle attest. But she is certainly literate, and impressively so. She carries a book bag bearing the logo of an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, from which she brings reading forth material that is invariably weighty. No Danielle Steele for Gladys; she reads Joyce Carol Oats, Margaret Atwood, Faulkner, Welty, Steinbeck. And she is serious enough that she owns her books rather than borrows them; no library stamps on these editions. She does prefer bargain, mass-market editions rather more expensive hardcovers and trade papers, but this is no flaw.

As an editor, I appreciate anybody who prefers to buy books, even second-hand, over borrowing them from the library. It speaks of someone who values books, has many around the home, and likely rereads them again and again.

Gladys, well, she looks like a Gladys, which is of course why I've given her this name. She is slightly round, about 50, 52 years of age, with a slightly frizzy hair treatment that suggests either a poor permanent-curling, or a treatment in need of renewal. Not quite beehive, but trending that way.  There isn't a lot remarkable about Gladys, and I imagine that a great many of the regular riders don't even recognize her as a regular.

Gladys normally takes a seat opposite me on the bus aisle,  three rows back. This too, just happens to be a habit, as the bus is quite empty early in the morning, and we both really have our choices of seats.

A week ago or so, a very interesting behavior began. When I get on the bus in the morning and begin walking down the aisle, Gladys now quickly gets up from her normal seat and scurries up to occupy the one that has been my more-or-less traditional home for years now.

Now, this would not be even noticeable, and certainly not something I'd even wonder about, if the seat was already occupied when I boarded the bus in the morning. The fascinating thing is Gladys' apparent need for me to be fully aware that she is deliberately moving into this seat so as to deny it to me.

Initially I was puzzled and a little annoyed. It's certainly no issue to me where I sit on the bus. But the fact of Gladys' deliberateness was a obvious statement of some kind. Then I grew concerned, and worried that I had inadvertently slighted her in some way and that her actions were a communication of some kind of anger. Had I accidentally cut her off in the aisle on some ride recently?  Had she tried to say hello on the street and had I ignored her? (This isn't uncommon, as my hearing isn't great these days). Or was she annoyed with the way I study people and using her act of as a way to say "bugger off, pal."

I could find no such faux pas on my part. My study of fellow humans is done very subtly, and I really don't think anybody catches on to the fact. The verbal portraits I draw about people are concluded from dozens, if not hundreds, of small glances that collect over many months.  I certainly don't stalk anybody, and don't ever stare at people for long periods at any one time in a way that would offend them.

And my memory is still good—almost photographic for visual things—and I would remember any act on my part that could be taken in an insulting way. No, these little acts of deliberate, mild hostility in Gladys seem self-born with no original causal event to explain it.

Then I found myself a little amused and even impressed with her. It shows more spunk than I frankly would have expected given her otherwise meek manner. It was mysterious, and mystery is fun. I was impressed in the same way that I applaud when a senior citizen burns rubber away from a stop sign.

I do wonder what the heck is going on with her, though, and at last have determined that her boss, who looks a little bit like me, is a real jerk giving her a hard time at work. Gladys' little acts of defiance toward me let her imagine that she's getting back at that asshole boss.

Tomorrow, I'm going to ask her if she wants to punch me in the stomach.  It will probably make her feel better, and maybe she'll smile later in the day when her boss starts to behave badly.  She is a small women, and it won't hurt very much. And besides, these days I am very well padded in that area of my anatomy.