I felt Just Like Marlin Perkins ...

It suddenly dawned on me, as I was suffering through public transportation on my way home from work the other night, at how much the Route 17 bus resembles Mutual of Omaha's, Wild Kingdom.

It started out as a quiet ride with only myself and a small handful of passengers making our way back to our respective homes dotting Center City and South Philadelphia, but as usual, the bus quickly filled up with an eclectic assortment of riders hauling shopping bags and baby strollers, all trying to squeeze past one another like a tank packed full of feeder fish; legs lifting over oversized Old Navy bags set down in the aisle as a single passenger fishes through a junk-filled purse looking for exact change while people left outside all funnel around the narrow doorway like a herd of refugees charging the back of a flatbed truck trying to get a bottle of water after a natural disaster. After several minutes all passengers are boarded; the sounds Nextels chirping endlessly and countless conversations in multiple dialects and slang filling the already cramped airspace.

I'm sitting in the first forward facing seat and I watch a black mother and her very overweight pre-teenage daughter take a seat in the bench infront of me. They're facing the aisle, so I'm viewing their profile. The daughter, too large for the small hard padded seat, is figiting, trying to get as comfortable as possible. Her mother pulls out her Nextel and immediately starts beeping someone on the other end, alerting them that they are now on the bus. Both females have similar hairstyles, but with slightly different "twists". The daughter's hair is tightly braided; black twists pulled back from her forehead, each perfectly spaced from the next, creating an alternating black/coffee colored horizontal striped pattern from her face to the center of the back of her head, where the braids from each side met in perfect alignment and were then twined together. What was leftover was not braided, but flared outward, all the way from the back of her neck up the center of her skull to her forehead, giving the illusion of a wild, wiry three inch mohawk. Although I couldn't get a great view of the mother's hairstyle, I did notice that she sported another version of a painfully tight braiding that looked to all converge under a hair extention which could've only been picked out of a pile of trash swept up from the curb.

The girl sang, her words unintelligible, her voice cracking like a reject from American Idol. She looked around the bus, her eyes darting from person to person without actually seeing anything, like a kid who's Ritalin hasn't quite kicked in yet. The mother continued to mutter into the Nextel, alternating the electronic contraption from her lips to her ear (thank God she had the courtesy of keeping the volume down). She then whispered something to her daughter and I, along with several other passengers in the front of the bus, became silently fixated on what we were seeing.

The girl reached up to her mother's head and, continuing to sing and only glancing quickly at what she was doing (her main attraction seemed to be still coming from somewhere behind me), she started to pull and tug at her mother's braids. The mother continued talking on her phone, seemingly unaware of her daughter's actions. One by one, the daughter reached into the mother's nest and yanked a braid, twisting it between her fingers and pulling out a tiny rubber band that kept the braid wound. She would slip the band over a fat finger and then reach up with both hands and proceed pull apart the strands of hair like wet pasta.

I winced in pain, wondering what this must feel like against the mother's scalp, but she just continued to hold a conversation. I realized that this must be a common practice among African American women, but, as I stared around at the other black women seated around me and noticed their shock and awe gazes, I realized that, maybe common, this shouldn't be something happening on a bus, but rather in the privacy of one's own home, or at least under the protective shade of a front porch on a hot summer afternoon when there was nothing else to occupy one's time.

This ritual went on for several blocks and probably long after I disembarked from the bus, since it appeared to be almost as long a process to take out the braids as it does to create. I, along with many other passengers, stared with disgusted fascination, but about midway through the ride home more passengers boarded the bus and my view was quickly blocked by another mother, this time seated between me and the mother/daughter team, and her young son (maybe 8 years old) seated on her lap.

The mother was dark skinned, the son light and, with soft wisps of curly hair instead of the tight matte of hair characteristic of the race, was obviously bi-racial. What amazed me most about the boy was his intelligence, especially for someone so young. He was a constant talker, discussing many subjects, but nothing his mother was actually listening to, his speach was more like that of someone twice, maybe two and a half times his age. His pronuciation was perfect, his vocabulary extensive, but what really got me was his Rainman-like obsession with Nemo. His monologue went from subjects across the board to Dustin Hoffman having to get to a tv before Jeopardy begins:

"We need to get home for Finding Nemo...Finding Nemo starts at 9:00, 7:00 central...I must watch Finding Nemo...It is now 9:00--"

"We'll make it." The mother chimes in.

"--7:00 central time...I must catch Finding Nemo from the beginning...Not at 9:15...Not at 9:10...Nemo starts at 9:00 o'clock on the dot, 7:00 central..."

Thank God I only had a few more blocks to go.

When I got off the bus, I thanked the silence that enveloped me, interrupted briefly by a car horn in the distance.

When I got into my house, I immediately headed to the fridge and cracked open a beer and chugged half of it down, trying to wash away the images and sounds from the bus. I then plopped down on the sofa, lit a cigarette, turned on the tv and watched...

Finding Nemo