that guy with his bike

I get up at quarter to six on Thursdays. I put on my bike clothes, pump up the tires, and at about 6:15 ride down the hill from my house to a corner where I meet a friend of mine named Brian. Then Brian and I ride over to a Coffee Bean where we meet up with 6 or 8 (or today 12) other people and we all do a ride together around Griffith Park.

While I'm standing at the corner with my bike for Brian to arrive I see every morning a woman on the other side of the street walk down to the corner and wait for a bus. There's no bench so she stands. She's dressed appropriately for an office. Usually she drinks a bottle of some kind of nutrition drink from a bottle while she waits. She always times the bus exactly, waiting no more than a minute or two before the bus pulls up and she gets on board and starts the ride toward downtown.

This morning when she showed up I said to myself, "There's the woman who waits for the bus." And then I had the thought that she was looking across the street at me thinking to herself, "There that guy with his bike." I'm not only the one having thoughts about the world. Sometimes the world thinks about me. It's startling when we have occassion to realize that there are other viewpoints than our own by which to view the world. All of them "right." And all of them different.