The Wheels on the Bus

January 27, 2009...
Have you ever read that poem by Shel Silverstein?...there´s too many kids in this tub, there´s too many elbows to scrub...Have you everseen a zombie movie?...the way the zombies all close in on one helpless victim before they tear him limb from limb (shudder)...Have you ever seen the ocean of people smushed into Times Square on New Year´s Eve? Have you ever seen the way paparazzi relentlessly swarm around Britney Spears after she´s been released from various institutions?
I´m beginning to like the buses less. Haha, yes, now I´m complaining, not revelling. Only a bit though, because I want to give you an honest scope of (my) Peru. I don´t want you to believe it´s all rainbows and lollipops or that, having the patience of a saint, I don´t ever get frustrated. I don´t have the patience of a saint. However, more often than not, our amazing God blesses me with his rich sense of humor, and I find myself able to laugh in those moments when there is no other remedy.
Today, my patience was too thin to support even the weightless ponderosity of laughter. The bus was that poem, that zombie movie, New Year´s Eve in Times Sqaure, and I was Britney Spears on the verge of another breakdown. Well, it´s really not all that serious. I´ll admit that I´m venting. Being a tinge melodramatic. I mean, the people on the bus didn´t eat me alive.
There was some collateral damage, though: a grudge against the bus that I´ll have to get over, and one sweater retaining the acrid imprint of BO, stamped with precision on my left shoulder. Am I being a snob? Eeek. Well, the bus was crowded to begin with, but then, at every stop, more and more people piled on until the ticket guy had no choice but to come around and begin arranging us into neat stacks of ten. Nah, that didn´t happen. Just the first part did. I sat in the aisle seat, next to a smelly man who had his five-year-old daughter on his lap. I was squashed into place with my head angled awkwardly to to the left, my shoulders angled oppositely, and my elbows crossed over my bag in a strange way, to make room for the sack the Inka woman was dangling just above me. I´ve never felt so much like a puzzle piece. And I´d never known that elbows have a magnetic pull to the back of my head. They must. A fractional movement in any direction would have meant a mouthful of hair, a breast to the eye, or another elbow. (I know, I know, waahh, waahh, waahh.)
It got better though. The smelly man seemed to try to protect me from the space invaders (and I´m truly not one who´s all about ¨personal space.¨ I find ardent, irrevocable value in touch and think that, as humans, we need more of it. But this was just ridiculous.) and we got talking. His name is Efrain and his daughter´s name is Melanie. He asked me about Barack Obama (as has been done in every random conversation I´ve come into) and expressed his own enthusiasm over this historical leap. Efrain restores churches and sculptures and is a painter and very, very kind. His daughter can count to five in English. Efrain´s imprint on my sweater is no big deal. I´ll just take it to the lavenderia. And for those reasons that have made me fall in love with being here, I won´t soon forget him.