Actually to be more precise, Elephant Man is actually Elephant Man Lady. I know this because I have actually seen under that voluminous hood, one day in the Summer when she was only wearing two coats instead of her usual four, and the hood was down.
Elephant Man Lady is another regular on the bus, although I hadn't seen her for a while, so I was pleased to see her again. It's reassuring to see the usual characters; you could say we are like a sort of large dysfunctional family now. A family of mutants and oddbods who mutter to ourselves and sometimes each other, and shuffle onto and off the bus in our giant snowboots and thick coats, trying not to knock each other over on the way.
Elephant Man Lady sits on the bus in her four coats, pulls that voluminous hood right over her entire face and shoves her phone underneath it. Maybe she is secretly reading saucy texts or 50 Shades of Grey or something and doesn't want any of her fellow commuters to see. She normally spreads herself and her bags across two seats, probably in a "keep away" kind of fashion, but I sat next to her the other day just to see if anything would happen. It didn't, although I got the feeling there was a certain amount of bristling annoyance under the hood caused by me invading her personal space.
Today there was a new person on the bus whom I shall call Yoga Man. Yoga Man looks a bit like Robert Carlyle the Scottish actor, and was dressed in the way of the person who would like to cycle to work but remembers that this is Alaska and therefore Freezing At All Times (except for about 9 days in the Summer when the snow finally disappears and the mosquitoes appear in herds) and so they put their bicycle onto the front of the bus, ride most of the way to work on the bus, then cycle the last 100 yards or so, arriving at work pink cheeked and out of breath, to the admiration of their coworkers who presumably think they have cycled the entire way.
Yoga Man had trousers with lots of zips on, drawn in at the bottom with shiny, light-reflective cycle clips. He had the usual huge backpack with drink bottle attached, which seems to be the norm here- although not for me of course, I carry my Harrods Union Jack bag to work proudly.
Several minutes into this morning's bus journey, Yoga Man earned his new name by suddenly beginning a series of increasingly strenuous arm exercises. He started off by clenching and unclenching his fists, looking very much like a baby trying to wave. He then moved on to clasping his hands together and making a lot of weird undulating arm movements which I'm sure I've seen in the video to Madonna's Vogue. Just when I felt he was going to hit someone, he stopped, piled on a few extra items of warm clothing and got off the bus with his bike. Ah, I thought, so he was merely warming up his muscles for the bike ride, although I couldn't understand why he'd only warmed up his arm muscles and not his legs. I soon found out.
As I got off the bus at the next stop and was waiting on the corner for the lights to change he almost ran me down as he whizzed past me on what looked like a push bike but sounded like a moped- no leg muscles needed!! Kinda reminds me of the time I was in the bike shop in Anchorage getting a new tyre for the pink child's bike Eskimo husband had bought me at a garage sale (size was perfect and colour matched my nail polish!) and I overheard a man asking the sales assistant how much it would cost to have an engine fitted on to a bicycle because "my wife doesn't like to pedal"........!! Way to go, America!! However, as that sounds like I'm being a bit negative I will finish with a quote from the original Elephant Man himself: "I sometimes think my head is so large because it is so full of dreams....."
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