Bus stop snapshots

About a month ago, I was waiting for a bus on my way home from a business trip to Braga, a city in the north of Portugal. My phone—which seems to have a brain and free will—decides that I do not have enough storage to take photos whenever I travel. This leads to the necessity for a notebook so that I can take written snapshots in those vacant moments when visual stimulation makes me want to document what I see.

At the time, I needed writing practice. No, not the kind you are thinking of. I had to practice my handwriting having had a two-month hiatus resulting from my being sideswiped when I dismounted from a Segway in Seville, sustaining a hairline fracture to my left wrist. The pain of the writing process took on a whole new meaning, but I am happy to report that my handwriting was legible, uniform and even. So, here are the two snapshots I managed to take in the spare hour I had at the bus stop.

Sketcher

I saw a man with dusty, dishevelled blonde hair sitting on the old church steps, with his backpack wedged between his side and the wall. In his notebook, he was sketching a quite portly old man, clean-shaven and wearing a sweat-drenched brown T-shirt and light grey trousers of the kind I could swear they stopped making about 30 years ago. He was sitting on a backless bench in the square, each arm outstretched with his hands gripping the edges. He seemed out of breath and not much interested in his surroundings.

As I walked up the steps, the man with the backpack closed his sketchbook a little so that I could not see what was on the pages. It is all very well to seem unaffected by passers-by, but that small action betrayed him; he was self-conscious despite his affectation to the contrary. I refrained from pointing out that one of his shoelaces was undone.

The man in the brown T-shirt didn’t give a damn about any of this. Good for him, I say.

Rescue routine

Outside my budget hotel, a woman of about 60 in a well-made grey and white cotton print dress pulled up and stopped her car on the corner at the start of a bus lane. She was looking in her rearview mirror, and then got out of her car and walked quite briskly towards a little old lady carrying two umbrellas, one that was long enough to use as a walking stick, the other, a cheap bright pink affair and much shorter – the kind that would make me a nice gift for a 10 year old girl for April showers in springtime.

The younger woman might have been her daughter, but she never called the old woman any variant of “mother”. All she said was, ”Where is your mobile phone?” The older woman pointed to her handbag strapped across her body, but could not get it out herself on account of her holding an umbrella in each hand. The younger woman seemed to me to be exercising a great deal of patience and trying hard to maintain her calm exterior. She located the mobile and removed it from the bag. She then prodded the keypad a few times and held the phone to the old woman’s ear to no effect. So, she fiddled about and did it again.

I guessed that there was some kind of recorded message on that phone, for after being somewhat flustered, the old woman became compliant and agreed to get into the woman’s illegally parked car. The younger woman opened the passenger door, but the older woman said she wanted to sit in the back. So her rescuer said,”Okay give me your umbrellas.” The old woman got into the back seat and was given her long umbrella to hold. The younger woman took the little pink umbrella and, shaking her head almost imperceptibly at the ridiculousness of the item, threw it into the boot of her car. She then eased herself behind the steering wheel, taking care with her dress, and drove away.

©2023 Allison Wright