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That regal old grande dame, Boston's South Station, was wearing a chin strap of orange
plastic mesh to keep it from drooping into the Big Dig tunnel construction. I joined the
line of bus passengers destined for Cape Cod.
"No clocks in Las Vegas," a woman said. "I was just there yesterday, or the day before."
We fell in step together.
"Mind if I sit next to you?"
I shook my head, and half-smiled. She took it as an invitation. I lack the social graces and
don't put myself out enough, people have told me. But I do try to remember that we don't
have overly many chances in life to get it right.
"Still have three days left on my seven-day pass," she said. "The beauty is all around us,
everywhere, not closeted away in dim rooms. San Diego to Provincetown. Coast to coast
in four days. Imagine!"
She never stopped talking for forty miles, and I never stopped straining to hear her
gravelly voice over the diesel roar.
Her Greyhound pass, "cheap enough even for a woman whose ex-husband's third wife
got all the money," was good for anywhere in the U.S., but expired wherever the traveler
found herself on the seventh day at midnight.
"You look artistic, the way you're dressed," she said, when I admitted having come from
the dim inside of an art museum. "I like the way you look."
I was dressed much like her – casual slacks, turtleneck, all-weather jacket to which I had
added a bright paisley scarf. She ran two blunt-nailed fingers over the silk, shifted her
weight onto one thin hip, and kept talking. I kept listening.
It was disconcerting how many life events we shared. Young wives of Naval officers in
San Diego in the sixties; too much pressure to conform and far too much drinking. And
love of tennis. And daughters, grown and gone. "My daughter would have said 'Go for
it,' had I told her I was getting on the bus."
But not the breast cancer. "Seven years of diagnosis and misdiagnosis and clinics and
treatment and surgery and strep infection. I forced myself to walk with tubes out both my
arms, dragging the apparatus up and down the corridors, to pump the poisons out of my
body." She held her arms up to demonstrate, laughing and wiping the spittle from her
lips.
"I got thrown out of the comedy club on Pearl Street in San Diego after only ten minutes
of doing my cancer routine." She sighed and leaned her head against the seatback. "They
said I was too vulgar."
At my stop, she stood in the aisle to let me out.
She hugged me. "Pray for me," she breathed into my ear. "Do you pray?"
I confessed that what praying I did was more like just talk.
"Over a cup of coffee, then, talk about me."
She had given me the essence of her life. Why didn't I think, quickly enough, to give her
my paisley scarf?
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