Saturday, July 21
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Chicago summer does not get any more beautiful than today. I finally got my lazy, summer afternoon that I have been dreaming about: painting on the back porch while listening to Fats Domino. Writer's date tonight & potentially chocolate cake.
A first draft character sketch loosely based off a very dear, God adoring friend.
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning Nateesha Marquez caught the 6:50 bus to the downtown campus. Although her anatomical studies professor presented himself, at best, five minutes after nine for each class, the bus ride chewed up an hour of her time in each direction. Good faith and optimism prior to the beginning of the semester had suggested ample study time. In reality, the commute proved that day dreaming and sizing up the strange personalities sitting among her would take up most of her time.
Anatomy, with true human dissection labs, was taught at the University by a wiry man with gray curly hair that bungied when he leapt across the auditorium stage. Nateesha arrived to class prepared with a tape recorder to record his brilliant but incredibly scattered lectures that usually began with the evolutionary notion that "When we were fish we required. . .". Somehow, his weaving and tangential thoughts proved to be impossible to follow when written in long hand from the second to back row. Thus was brilliance, she decided, and studied her audio tapes every evening.
The class was a perfect experience for the kinesthetic learner that she was. In labs she would run her fingers along and through structures as though she was thoroughly finger painting something. She was not afraid to squish things that looked squishy and palpate things that resisted her. During pencil and paper examinations taken in the lecture room, one could observe her fingers moving in rote patterns, tracing the brachial plexus or point of origin and insertion of the seratus muscle.
When she wasn't metamorphosing into a nurse, she played journalist on the bus. By the third week of school she began to recognize familiar faces seated in informally assigned seats. She liked to believe she was the Jane Goodall of this sometimes oily, hot, smelly, and rarely comfortable ecosystem called the metro transit. If nothing else had been learned that day, bus etiquette and bus rider-isms had been observed.
Route 6 was infamous for it's two stops in some seedier parts of town just before it reached campus. It didn't take an astute observer to notice how women conveniently placed their large purses on the seats next to them and hid their faces in magazines that had been flipped through twice. This phenonemon rather irritated Nateesha as it resulted in tall, short, body odiferous, and perfumey women standing in the narrow aisle surfing with the rocking motion of the bus. By the fifth week she called people on it, tapping them on their shoulders once the bus was full and asking loudly, "Is somebody using this seat?" The response usually resulted in a woman cantankerously but silently placing the purse back onto her lap and someone standing having enough initiation to sit down.
What mystified Nateesha's cognitive abilities was not the mumbling man with probable DSM-IV diagnosable schizophrenia nor the driving record of the bus driver who almost took out two bicycles in one day. It was her absolute conviction that the woman who entered and exited the bus every morning and afternoon at Lindale street loved Jesus.
posted by Jenny Saturday, July 21, 2007
