Bus Rides in Summer

This morning, I got off the Route 80 bus at the bottom of North Capitol street to switch to the DC Circulator bus as the noise in the Route 80 bus was just too loud for me. Everyone was having extreme cell phone calls at 8:45 a.m. in the morning, telling off their kids or screaming at their spouses or demanding something from somebody or telling the dentist they were going to be late, or things like that. Plus the bus was crowded; even though I got a seat, I found myself jammed into an inside seat by a very large man who, of course, was yelling into his cell phone the whole time the bus meandered its way down North Capitol street from my street to the Post Office at the corner. And everyone was standing and lurching into one another at every stop and looking like they could bite someone if you looked at them the wrong way. At the Florida Avenue intersection a very drunk looking older guy was yelling at the bus waving his fist, looking already like he was over-heated and quite dehydrated. Even more people piled onto the bus so, feeling more than just slightly claustrophobic, I got off before the Massachusetts Avenue turn to transfer to a nice uncrowded Circulator bus which pulled up almost immediately. Since that's the beginning of that route, there were only three people on the bus and I got a wide seat all to myself. This lasted until 7th street when a huge crowd got on bringing gusts of hot August air in with them, turning the bus into another hot, human-filled metal container. But no one was making loud cell phone calls; instead they all seemed to have plugs in their ears attached to those IPod music things so they couldn't hear anybody and clearly didn't want to talk to anyone. The bus got caught in traffic and took ten minutes to go from 11th to 14th streets due to some tie-up involving an out-of-town car backing into moving traffic just to drive the rest of us crazy in the heat in the summer. Bus rides can be a humbling experience! Lord, get me through today!