The Pendulum of Coincidence

The Dirty-Eight Geary--while often full of unpleasant smells and uncomfortable situations, I find that many of my daily affirmations of happiness occur while riding the love-to-love-it, love-to-hate-it MUNI bus.

It was hard not to stare when an elderly midget woman wearing a sparkly pink dress and various colorful accessories climbed daintily into the seat across from me, her sneakered feet hanging half a foot off the floor. I guess it would have been one of those "only in San Francisco" moments where you shake your head knowingly and give yourself a little self-appreciative punch on the shoulder for living in such a crazy place, but I was so zoney baloneyed from my 7am - 3pm shift that all I could do was stare, and I had forgotten my ipod bus-interaction-shield, which we all know is crucial to pretending not to care what is going on around you while riding muni.

I wondered if she didn't want me to watch her, even though she was wearing all that awesome stuff. But my prying eyes were rewarded when, without prompting, she animatedly began giving directions to the foreign, map-toting tourist next to her. After telling him what was up and offering to get off and help him find his transfer bus, she asked him what language he spoke. "German," he replied, and before he could even get the word completely out of his German mouth, she began spouting the Deutsch like she learned to swim in it.

Watching what was essentially a real life Fairy Godmother speaking German on Muni was a little bit sensational. It was a real treat, let me tell you, and it only got more cliche and inspiring when the older business man next to me took advantage of the lull in their conversation to physically reach across the aisle towards her, hoping to glean some of her magic. "Excuse me for asking," he prefaced tentatively but excitedly, "but how many languages do you speak?"

She waved her hands as if she knew too many to count, and said, "It's a gift, it's a gift. It's like music to me."

"Does it get harder to learn as you get older? Because I want to learn a language, but I'm worried..."

"No! No, just practice. Practice practice practice, like music!" she exclaimed, and went right back to chatting in German.

Stories

Sometimes when I come home drunk, and am not quite ready to go bed yet, I grab whatever book is closest to my pillow and "read" it. I actually spent an entire summer making almost no progress on what turned out, in the end, to be one of my favorite books, Kafka on the Shore, because nearly each night, I would fall intoxicatedly onto my futon, read three pages at the max, and then pass out. When I would return to the book upon a more sober moment, I would have to re-read all the damage I had done in my well-intentioned but low-functioning state the night before. Last night was one of these nights for me, and when I woke up this morning to see another of my all-time favorites, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on my bed beside my head, I remembered one of the wonderful quotations I had drunkenly savored the night before. As it first introduces one of the two main characters, Sammy Clay,

"He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when someone called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition--one of a thousand--of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus."


Ah. I love it. I first read that book Sophomore year of high school when we had to do a book report on a Pulitzer winner. I read 400 of the 636 pages the night before the report was due, expecting to skim, speed read, and call it quits early. Before I knew it, I found myself sobbing onto the final page at 4:30am, far too invested in the characters and enchanted by the language to stop any earlier. I highly recommend Michael Chabon's work, the few books/short stories of his I've read have been grand.

book suggestions, anyone?