From Doug's email to my sister:
"...Second, when I got on the bus Ben was on, so I sat down next to him. He was carrying kind of a crazy amount of stuff with him, as apparently today is the journal pot luck and he had to bring a bean salad to school (weird). Not happy about the situation, Ben says to me "I feel like a bag lady today." The thing is though, there was an actual bag lady sitting directly behind us. The cruel irony of this Brandeis-educated Jewish guy in a North Face jacket choosing that particular simile at that particular moment was apparently not lost on the woman, who tapped him on the shoulder and said, "You think you feel like a bag lady, I AM a bag lady!" She then held up a Clorox bottle, sealed only by a shred of cling wrap, that had some kind of red substance oozing out of the top of it and asked Ben to touch it. When he did, she asked him why he just touched anything people asked him to. Ben later confided to me that the bottle was strangely hot. She then asked me if I could read bad handwriting, and I replied that I sometimes could, so she pulled out a notebook and handed it to me. Written on it was a rap song about Obama, the election, the Constitution, and religion. It was a little nonsensical and hyperbolic in parts, but it completely flowed, she had a better vocabulary than most college freshmen (and she clearly hadn't used a thesaurus), and a shocking ability to spell. "I scribbled that out on the bus," she said. "Pretty good for a bag lady, huh?" I had to admit, it was."
By the way, if anyone has any other amazing stories involving public transportation, email me, I'd love to start a series of stories/photos on it.
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