The #44 is an east-west route, and my ride started near Husky Stadium, where sweaty alleged students at the University of Washington play football. I'd come via the Link light rail, getting off at University of Washington Station, where coming up from the subway, you emerge on a wide concrete walkway with a built-in annoyance.
The first bus stop is on the other side of Montlake Boulevard, in the middle of a very long, heavily-trafficked block.
It's public transit designed by people who don't use public transit: To get to the bus stop, you either jaywalk across wide and busy Montlake Blvd, or go the long and legal way, walking half a long block north or south, waiting at a stop light, crossing the street, then walking half the long block back to the bus stop.
Crossing the street legally takes about five minutes. Or, there's a lovely pedestrian bridge, which, by the time you've gone up up up a lot of stairs and then down down down a lot of stairs, adds up to about the same five minutes for crossing the street.
I jaywalked, of course, and got honked at as I crossed the street in mere seconds. Hundreds of people must jaywalk there every day, to save five minutes and catch the next bus instead of the bus after that. Doubtless some people have been hit by cars and died, crossing to reach a bus stop that's stupidly in the middle of the block instead of at a corner.
Soon as I hopped aboard the bus, it turned west onto Pacific Street, going past the giant University of Washington Hospital. That's where Dr Belding Scribner invented dialysis, which kept my wife alive for seven years after her kidneys failed.
If she wasn't dead and Doc Scribner wasn't dead too, she'd thank him for that. But she'd want me to add that dialysis is horrible and always left her weak and ruined for the rest of the day. Basically, it's three days a week of absolute torture, allowing life the other four days. 42.9% of a life, she often grumbled, but she'd add that it's nice being alive and able to grumble about it.
The bus turned north onto 15th Avenue, which is where you start seeing non-football parts of the University — halls, dorms, apartments, etc.
From the passengers getting on and off and the people on the sidewalk, my scientific analysis of UW demographics is that 40% of the students are Asian, 25% white, almost none are black, and about 25% are gorgeous babes. If I had to commute to work five days a week, the #44 through the University would not be unpleasant.
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Waiting at a stop light, my eyes settled on a semi-cool old apartment or dorm building, and I wondered about its age and architecture and how many generations of teenagers and early-20-somethings had lived there.
As I was thinking and watching, someone's sixth-floor Venetian blinds went up very, very slowly, making me wonder if the blinds were controlled by an app set to 'crazy slow'. For twenty seconds, the blinds continued rising at about an inch per second, and if the blinds were ever all the way up, what would be next?
Would a young apparition in a tweed jacket and straw hat stand at the window, an eternal holdover from the University's class of 1918? I don't believe in such things but I've seen it in the movies and it might've been excellent, and a shadow of grayness from a cloud passed over... but the light turned green and the bus rolled away before any human or ghost came to the window.
After we'd turned west onto 45th Street, we rolled past the Neptune Theater. In the pre-video era, the Neptune showed a different old movie every night, often double features, and Rocky Horror every Friday and Saturday at midnight. I moved into the neighborhood mostly for the Neptune, and the Grand Illusion and the Varsity and the University and the Metro, always a short walk to a good movie.
Those were the days, my friend, and now most of those screens are gone, and the Neptune is a rock'n'roll venue, which is better than tearing it down, but for me it might as well be closed.
Hmmm. Leon Coffee House. Thought it looked nice, so I wrote it in my notebook. Their website says they sell coffee, sandwiches, and waffles, but the menu doesn't include prices, and a lack of listed prices tends to scare me away.
A few blocks later, there's a cross road where my pal Bruno parked his car, the night we went to see Solaris at the Neptune. Can't forget the night and place because the film broke and couldn't be repaired, so everyone left the theater without seeing the end of the movie.
Bruno and I stood by his car for half an hour that night, guessing wrong how the movie ended, and then we went for pizza at a place down the street. Like a lot of the neighborhood, the pizza place is gone, and the building it was in is gone, too. Eventually, everything gets gone, including Bruno, and me, and you.
Hey, but the Blue Moon ain't gone yet. There it sits, exactly as it was way back in the 1980s, when it was the only bar I've been in often enough to feel like a regular. I ought to go back there, one fine night.
I had a beer at the Blue Moon maybe twenty times (which is about half the times I've ever had a beer), and yet, the only visit to the Blue Moon I specifically remember is the one night I was there with Sarah-Katherine, a lady who briefly floated into and then, of course, out of my life in the mid-1990s.
The bus went over the gulch and stink of Interstate-5, and into the Wallingford neighborhood, where I spotted a familiar triangular Winchell's sign that said "open." Instinctively I patted my wallet and rang the bell to get off. I'd been on my way to a restaurant after my bus ride, but it didn't matter. Mmmm, doughnuts...
Winchell's is a chain of doughnut shops that was ubiquitous in Seattle when I was a kid and young man, and I absorbed millions of calories at Winchell's in Rainier Beach, Winchell's in Lake City, and this very Winchell's in Wallingford. But the sign was a lie twice told — it's not a Winchell's any longer, and it's not open. Sadly doughnut-free, I waited to resume my ride on the next westbound #44.
Leaning on a rock nearby was a white woman maybe 30 years old. You don't know her, nobody does, but if you live in any American city, you know her look. Dressed strangely and too long unwashed, she had a face of smudged makeup and a forest of hairy hairdo, and she was wearing shorts showing scratched and cut-up legs. Her eyes were glassy when they were open, but she was drifting in and out of consciousness. Fentanyl or a more old-fashioned drug, was the only question.
But actually the question was, "Can I use your phone?"
Dumb me, I'd been checking my text messages, so I couldn't claim to have no phone. I mulled it over for a few seconds, but what's the harm in a small kindness for the doomed? "Yeah," I said, "but it's gotta be quick. I'm waiting for a bus."
"Are you waiting for a #44?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Never mind, then. Here it is." Turned and looked, and she was right, the #44 was pulling into the stop.
"Sorry," I said, and I was, but only about 1/3. The other 2/3 of me was happy to get away from her.
Urban living is like that. You can feel sympathy for street people in general, or for specific street people, and I had enough sympathy for that woman to let her use my phone... but not if it meant waiting another twelve minutes for the next #44.
The door whooshed open, and I flashed my bus-pass to the machine inside, and show a last glance at that woman I'd left on the sidewalk. How little future awaits her, I thought, but let the thought go.
Sorry, you can't care, or you'd go crazy. I took a seat on the other side of the bus, and looked the other direction.
Out the window as the bus rolled along:
Golden Oldies Records,
Dick's Drive-In, maybe
Sea-Thai Restaurant, a library branch, and
Archie McPhee's for all your rubber chicken needs.
Also spotted a very pretty and too young blonde behind the wheel of a dented car half her age, waiting at the light at Stone Way. She bopped her head to music I couldn't hear, singing along and briefly picking her nose, which made me laugh.
Then the bus jiggered north a block to 46th, and rushed past the momentary murals under Aurora Avenue. The art is momentary because you're going 25 mph, passing under a freeway, concrete and cars everywhere in a cloud of traffic, engine noise, and the stink of exhaust.
Then onto Market Street, which is steeper than I'd remembered, going quickly down the hill. Lots of houses, each with a view of lots of houses.
As we passed a gas station at 8th & Market, I watched a pedestrian dropkick a Lime scooter, and silently applauded. I love toppling the scooters, and wish more people had the habit.
Branded Lime, those electric scooters are everywhere in the city. They're a convenience and look like fun, but when the rented ride is finished, the scooter is usually left straddling a sidewalk, blocking pedestrians, and good luck to anyone trying to squeeze past in a wheelchair.
Lime's website says, comically, "If you see a Lime vehicle parked illegally or improperly, such as blocking a pathway or tipped over, please let us know. You can report it using the Lime app..."
You could spend all day reporting Limes improperly parked, but it's easier and more fun to topple them, or toss them into the bushes.
And here's another complaint... After a long stretch of residential comes a longer stretch of commercial, and it's a cliché to say it, but there's too much newfangled bullshit and too many chain stores in the business areas. Every block seems the same as the block before.
Even some of the old buildings that could be cool, have ugly, bland modern fake fronts attached, like the goal is to look as soulless as the buildings next door and across the street.
"Up to 3,800 square foot restaurant space available," which will soon be a Qdoba, or someplace equally awful. The city, and all America, has moved far past me and my puny life, and my unimportant recollection of what these neighborhoods were, when they were neighborhoods.
Here's a quite ordinary intersection, and what's there? Verizon, Pep Boys, Walgreens, Safeway, Papa John's, Wendy's, Five Guys, O'Reilly Auto Parts, and what used to be a Target across the street. Was I even in Seattle? How could you tell? It could just as easily have been Minneapolis, or Milwaukee. When everything is a chain, anywhere is everywhere.
But there's still, or again, the
Majestic Bay Theater. It used to be a run-down rat-trap third-run theater where I saw movies for 99¢, but while I was away from Seattle for so many years, they tore it down and built a new theater on the same spot.
Never yet been inside the new theater, but everyone says it's swell, and I'm curious how they shoehorned three screens into the same real estate that used to have one kinda small theater. The marquee says admission is only six bucks on Tuesdays, so maybe one Tuesday soon I'll find out.
The bus went past the National Nordic Museum, which is on my gotta-go-there list but not for today.
Soon my #44 made its last turn, south on 32nd Avenue, near the Chittenden Locks, and the ride was over.
At the corner is the Ballard Senior Center, where they were having a rummage sale on the day of my excursion. They were selling women's wear and almost nothing but, and I do look fine in a dress, but I'd come for the Lockspot Cafe, a couple of blocks up 54th Street.
This entry is too long already, so my page and a half of notes on the restaurant will get their own entry, one of these days.
As for the #44, it's a fine ride to Ballard and back again. Except for that soon-to-be dead addict and all the chain stores, it hums along at a good pace, with nothing but pleasant views and memories out the window.
10/10/2024
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