ON THE STREET

There are times when things simply will not go as planned. Take this morning, for example. I awoke to the news that it might rain. That was bad. Rain in November is never a good idea. The weather lady said it had stopped raining. That was good, because I was planning to walk all the way up the hill to get a bus. A walk up the hill is the exsercise I need in the morning of a busy day. But when I got outside, the front sidewalk was so slippery that I had to keep one foot in the snow to steady myself on the slippery slope. So much for the planned walk up the hill. But the city sidewalk wasn’t slippery. The up-the-hill plan was back in motion. But in order to climb the hill I had to pass a bus stop. A bus was coming,. Fortunately, I had not quite reached the stop. But the bus made a sudden stop, right beside me. The driver jumped out. “did you want my bus?” What could I say? I got on the bus. “The bus is full,” said the driver. “that’s fine,” said I. “I will stand at the front since I am not going far.” But the crowd had already parted and someone had jumped up pushing people back to make a seat for me. So I sat down out of respect for all the people who had been inconvenienced. What else could I do? Some days things simply will not proceed according to plan. I would not have planned to write this on THE HOPE LADY Blog, had it not been for a thing that happened yesterday. It was a beautiful evening and I had decided to walk four blocks along Jasper avenue to catch a bus. I had to pass two bus stops along the way. At the first, a slurry-voiced man with unpleasant breath jumped to his feet to ask: “Ma’am, would you like to sit on this bench?”. I declined. Another man approached the first and asked “should I throw you in the traffic?” He declined. Then the second man asked the first: “should I throw her into the traffic?” He meant me. Just to prove it, he began to follow me. Then he passed. He was waiting for me at the next bus stop. He shouted, but did not throw me into the traffic. So I wrote about my failed attempt to get exercise by climbing the possibly-icy hill in the rain. It’s a better story than yesterday’s.