Rhythm is a (Bus) Dancer

The experience of public transit is very much like that of life itself; interminable right up until the end at which point it seems to have only just begun.  Unless you're very lucky you're likely to face conditions that are crowded and unpleasant and the whole time you'll be forced to endure the company of a great many people you would rather have avoided.

Il Terrazzo | 555 Johnson Street | Victoria

For someone who grew up in a town with a population that was, at the time, predominantly Italian, I know very little about "Il Bel Paese."  For a long time most of what I knew came from the Godfather films and Friday dinner at Tony's Roma and I naturally assumed most Italians were hirsute, husky-voiced men who knew their way around a kitchen and to whom I should avoid owing money.  Even after six years of working in Bocci's, our specialty delicatessen, which at first was aimed toward attracting the town's aging Italian population, I was only able to expand my knowledge of Italy in two areas: cheese, which while invaluable gave me little insight into the country and its people, and finance.  It seemed impossible that anyone could owe money to an Italian since it meant the Italian would have to have parted with it in the first place.  Every Sunday while we sat around a table laden with pasta, sauce and meatballs, my Italian relatives would speak of the old country's verdant, rolling fields and simple way of life in such loving tones that I assumed it to be an Eden filled with olive groves and young men whose refusal to move out of their mother's home was based on devotion and not at all indicative of serious character flaws.  

Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

During the early afternoon of March 20 I had lunch with a friend, hunted around for a pair of steel-toed shoes and picked up a handful of CDs at Lyle's Place; it was, in short, a very usual Saturday afternoon.  That evening Nicky & I had dinner with our friends Mike & Alicia and 10:18pm were part-way in to watching a film with them when my phone rang and a very usual day became one I wouldn't forget.  When I saw that it was my mother calling from her home in Campbell River, I went cold with apprehension.  We usually speak once a week but rarely in the evening and never past ten, and I instinctively expected bad news.  Bad news didn't quite cover it.  She had called to tell me that three hours before, my uncle Jim, a fixture of my life since birth and, in the absence of my own father, someone who had come to occupy that role in my heart, had died suddenly while on vacation.  Details were scarce at this point, the only certainties being that he was gone and that his wife Susan, my aunt, was now alone in Tehachapi, California, without her husband of thirty-five years.  We didn't speak long as other calls needed to be made, and shortly thereafter my phone rang again and didn't stop until long past midnight.  One call was from my aunt Susan, who sounded frighteningly adrift when she explained that Jim had simply gone down to the pool for a swim and never come back.  The doctors initially guessed he'd had a heart attack but the final word would have to wait until an autopsy had taken place; as of this writing we still do not have a definitive answer.  She was alone but the responding officer had gone out of his way to make her as comfortable as possible and two of Jim's brothers, Dennis & Bryon, and Bryon's wife Linda, would be arriving into Bakersfield first thing the next morning.  I hope to never again hear the voice of someone I love so dearly sound so empty, and so lost.  After we hung up Nicky & I both tried to process the idea that this vibrant, loving, outgoing man was, after only fifty-five years on the planet, gone forever.  We have both lost family members over the years but never one so young, or so quickly.