On the fast lane with Mrs. Roe

Mrs Roe leaves every morning at 7:20 to get to her job at the greenhouse. She always looks a bit rushed, almost late. With her goes a black and silver coffee mug and a black lunch box whose carefully packed contents are unknown to me except for a banana strapped on the top. She gets into her white never washed rusty 1984 Ford pick up truck, backs out into the alley, waves goodby and darts away.

I rode with her today.

I was amazed at the amount of preparation that have gone into the trip. She had taken cigarrettes with her, and a lighter; a newspaper to read at work, a change purse to buy a soda can. She had her sunglasses on. Everything went acording to plan. She knew when to switch lanes, knew which streetlights were slow, what were the turns and where to speed.

The rest was concentration and zeal. We left 10 minutes late which ment, as she anounced, that we had to run. "It is green folks!" to the lane of morning commutters packed in front of her. Tension in the air and her, ready to swerve around, to go, to make the engine reve and the back wheels of the pick up skid on desperation to grab onto the ground. But it didn't happen, there was just the tension, the readines and the zeal.

Half an hour on the highway with this lady at seventy miles an hour with the tension and the zeal of her morning commute as she drinks her coffee smokes her cigarrettes and listens to scratchy blues on the makeshift speakers I put in for her is like a dream. The sun marks her face with shadows under her shades, the windows are open and the smoke desapears into the slower lanes. All that and the enjoyment of everything going so perfectly, of knowing that the old tires on the old rusty truck will not blow up at seventy miles an hour today in the middle of a sticky Missouri summer and that soon she will be sitting on a step ladder flipping through the paper and eating her banana.

She will be done at 4 pm sharp. In the meanwhile she'll be sweating, laughing laudly, cursing and getting bored surrounded by geraniums, bags of fertilizer, bottles of sodium sulfide, windvanes and a dog. I go back to St. Louis making 55 on the highway and thinking of writing this impression of when I drove Mrs Roe into her job and peeked into her queerky dangerous ways.