I shouldn’t have been going to work, but I was. I had volunteered to substitute teach for one of my colleagues.  I am not sure whether I volunteered out of friendship or the desire to make a few extra dollars, though I am leaning more towards the profit motive as time goes on.

I should also be clear that Today’s Perfect Moment won’t be the flurries that happened shortly after I boarded the bus for work. Yeah, they were beautiful, but I’ve had enough.  I want winter over and done with.  I have already written about the Last Gasp of Winter and I really don’t want to do that again.  I guess I can stick to a technicality.  The Last Gasp was a bona fide snowstorm with actual accumulation.  These were just flurries and don’t really hold a candle to a true winter snowfall.

Today’s Perfect Moment is instead a moment of beautiful randomness. That you can see evidence of a snowfall in the picture may contribute to the randomness of it all, but should not be considered an endorsement of winter.  As I have already hinted, I want to out on my bicycle ASAP.

This is the story. I boarded the bus some time before eleven o’clock.  I haven’t taken the bus at this time in quite a while, but I do remember that at this time of day there is a different breed of public transportation user on the bus.  Though it may seem like it (as I have a well-known sarcastic tone) different is not being used as a euphemism for weird, but merely unusual.  Today was an exception and the bus was mostly filled with average people without a trace of sketchiness about them.  The bus trip itself was rather weird though,because we had two driver changes in the same trip–one near the beginning and one near the end..  It annoys me when there is one; so you can imagine how I felt when they had two.  Seemed like poor planning to me.

I spent the early part of the trip looking over the material I was going to have to teach. While the flurries caught my attention, they didn’t hold it.  I needed to concentrate on the material for some time.  At some point, for reasons that I am not entirely sure about, I looked out the door at one of the stops.  Maybe something caught the corner of my eye, or maybe I just needed a break from the material in the text.  Whatever the reason, I certainly didn’t expect to find a moving dolly occupying my view outside the door.

Sure, there was/is a lot of construction being done on the road to make room for dedicated bus lanes, left turn protocols, and signals to facilitate those protocols. However, none of this heavy construction equipment requires a dolly—a huge construction crane or backhoe maybe, but not a dolly.

I am so happy I was able to take a picture before the bus started moving again.  And, I suppose it isn’t weird, but it certainly struck me as random. Why was a dolly parked there?  Who left it?  Were they coming back for it?  As I look at the picture now, I can clearly see tire marks of a truck.  This brings up other questions that I didn’t ask at the time.  Had they used it to load or unload the truck and then simply driven off without it?

I didn’t have much time to ponder it after taking the picture because a lovely older woman sat down beside me and started a conversation with me. As this happens rarely, I maintained my side of the conversation and turned off the interior monologue.  However, the image of a lonely moving dolly abandoned in a field stayed with me for the rest of the day.

If you liked this post, I recommend you read about some of my other bus encounters.

The Two Fisted Drinker

Scenes from a Rainy Day