Alewife Bus Encounter: Part I

 When I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I lived close to Alewife Station, a major train and bus hub. This worked perfectly for me because I lived alongside the Alewife Nature Reservation but had walkable access to the station from which I used to take a bus to my office in Waltham each day of the week and The T Metro through Harvard, MIT, into Downtown Boston on evenings and weekends. The bus was subsidised and cost $100 per month, and I spent on average about $30 a month of The T. I had no need for a car. 

                  The bus to Waltham was not always the easiest to ride, especially when one particular driver, we called him Gargamel (after the character in The Smurfs), was at the wheel. He was heavy on acceleration and braking, so the first thirty minutes of each day upon arrival at the office was spent dealing with motion sickness. Our office was in an office park surrounded by tech and bio-tech companies and sometime in mid-2017, an Asian lady started to get onto the bus at Alewife and get off a few offices before mine, at one of the bio-techs. I nicknamed her ‘Wonder Woman’ because she was so athletic, so beautiful, and so exciting. Each morning I walked excitedly to the station hoping to see her and when I did see her, I would make death-defying attempts to form conversation with her, even if it was just a ‘thank you’ or a ‘good morning’ or a ‘you go first.’  

                  After several months, I could take no more… I was besotted with Wonder Woman and wanted to finally make a move. The bus was too quiet and open for an embarrassing conversation, so I took one of the unique cards that an artist friend in Madrid had made for me, with a caricature of myself reading a book on a couch as the cover art, and scribbled a little note with my phone number to say that I found her fascinating and would love to buy her a drink some time.

                  I spent the whole day in a fit of embarrassment and nausea, feeling that I had made a fool of myself when, suddenly, late afternoon, a text message arrived saying ‘thank you for the cool card, I would love to go for a drink.’ I jumped up and cheered… and almost threw up in fear. We exchanged a few messages and agreed to go out for dinner later that week. 


To be continued...



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