Headways
Dallas Diarist. Plus: new writing on being a type
On Monday I watched each train I needed to catch pull away from the station just as I reached it. Four in all, followed by a wait of eight to twenty minutes for the next one. I remembered with a bitterness the frequency of arrivals in Vienna, where I came out of the train station one night just missing my tram and cursing because the next one wouldn’t be for seven minutes—the only time I can remember waiting longer than four. The psychological after-effects of a city just stunting on you like that are not trivial. Other places do this, and they aren’t richer than we are.
Not that my Dallas transit commutes are some kind of nightmare, though if my job were less flexible it would be hard to use. The Sun Belt transit settlement offers regular opportunities to cultivate your Stoicism. Wait longer, walk further, master your impatience, listen to your easy-French news podcast, use your daily office app. Remind yourself that apart from an unlucky few weeks last fall, the system is not particularly given to murders. I wrote once that you can’t know a city until you’ve spent a hundred hours on its buses, and I have not reached that possibly arbitrary threshold for Dallas. With five daily destinations, three drivers, and two cars in my household, however, choices have to be made and I am happy to be taking the train often of late. More or less.
It just so happened that I needed to take a side quest on Monday and my luck was bad all around. I used the DART app to find the best route away from the hospital where I had made a late-afternoon call and settled, not without my doubts, on a bus line a few blocks away that would take me to my train line. It was not a bus I’d taken before, and not a part of the city I’d explored on foot. A strenuous walk got me there several minutes ahead of the next scheduled arrival time. “Next one won’t be for a while,” the woman sitting in the bus shelter told me. “Two just went past a few minutes ago.”
She was an older woman with several bags hanging from her walker. I told her what the app told me—I didn’t think she was using the app—and we shrugged together at the uncertainty of it all. She took out a joint and stood up to shuffle outside of the shelter to light it and I insisted she stay seated (I know about how unpleasant public disorder is to people but I can’t imagine even Charles Fain Lehman himself would be so unchivalrous as to insist that this sweet old lady go to any trouble to spare him a little second-hand weed smoke). “Unless you’re worried about getting in trouble, then go ahead and move out of the shelter.”
“No, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she insisted.
“It’s fine, I’ll just tell anyone who asks that I was on the bus.” She offered me some and I politely declined.
After two puffs, she put it in a little joint carrying case and rifled through a bag for her Lucky Strikes. She offered me one of those, too. I thanked her but told her I quit.
“Oh, well then next time I see you I won’t offer.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I assured her. “There’s quitting and then there’s quitting.”
She said the weather reminded her of California, and I mentioned that I’d just been there a few weeks ago. She moved away a week before the Northridge earthquake. Maybe she should go out again. Does the train go there? I think so. We reminisced about the days when trains had smoking lounges. Then she was reflective:
“It’s ok that we have to socialize without cigarettes now. If you were really into a conversation, you just let your cigarette burn down anyway.”
“Waste of a cigarette.”
“And the ice would melt in your drink and your drink would be all watery,” she went on. I told her I never had the problem of ice melting in my drinks.
This got us onto the subject of Long Island Iced Tea. “…Next thing I remembered was somebody pushing me into a cab,” she said as the bus turned up. I stepped up into the doorway, wondering if I needed to stall the driver as she collected herself. She stubbed out the Lucky and pocketed the remainder as she assured the driver she was coming. It takes a minute when you’ve got three bags and a walker. The bus kneeled and I hoisted the walker into the doorway.
We sat perpendicular to each other for the mile or so to the train station. I asked where she was going but couldn’t make out the answer. I said goodbye, stepped off, dashed down a few flights of stairs and escalators, and reached the fourth platform of the day as the train eased off down the tunnel.
They’re cutting DART service, predictably, and several cities have discussed backing out of the funding and governance agreement that structures the system. I signed on to a clergy letter urging the wealthy enclave where I work not to vote to do that because some in our communities depend on it. There were maybe five of us on that bus for that mile, but I don’t think she was the only one of them who lacked other good options. It’s hard to have to hang on to the city’s ragged edge of recognition.
Nevertheless, I was grateful for the extended bus headway. On the expressway, your fellow commuters are the cause of your misery rather than a mild balm for it, and virtually no one offers you a hit off their joint from the next car over. It seems unlikely that our paths will cross again, but I am tempted to keep a pack of Luckies on me for her just in case they do.
New Writing: On Being a Type of Guy
My March column for the Christian Century went up just a little too late to be included in my Vienna travelogue. I talk about the same book I mentioned, Short Life in a Strange World, as a point of departure for my (re)discovery that even our most specific passions make us part of a type:
In online discourse, there’s a pigeonhole for everyone—Karens, debate bros, daily Chipotle eaters—to say nothing of the broader demographic categories to which we are all liable to be reduced. A few details, a few personal tics, a few volumes on a bookshelf are all you need to pin a person to the board of a type. It’s a cheap, easy dopamine hit. On the other hand, it feels spiteful and unjust to be the one summed up in such derisive shorthand. I may eat Chipotle every day, but my enjoyment of their burritos is unique and pure! And there is so much more to me than that, anyway.
Both impulses—to fix a type and to resist being typed—contain something true. Our types capture a real thing about us, even if we remain irreducibly individual. My enthusiasm for the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and my craving—toxic, you might argue, without objection from me—to see them in person may characterize me as a “Bruegel bro.” On the other hand, it is still mine, still embedded in experiences of surprise and recognition that no one could have on my behalf.
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Your bus ride diary was a great read. Thank you!