  To start, yesterday: The SEPTA conductor almost passed me by, leaving me to ride the train free. Or so I thought. The conscience intervened and had me hold out my prepaid Market East ticket for him to punch a dozen times. I could have sworn that someone gave me a look; I had, after all, tried to pay Septa. Isn't petty theft the American way? Not in those words. I followed a man to the PATCO, stage two of the homeward journey for this peripatetic soul. Moderate height, overall unassuming man with a greasy balding haircut and thick glasses made of swirling black/brown translucent plastic. The type not commonly considered "fashionable" since some time in the dark ages of the 1980s. Beige shirt, leather suitcase.
Hurrying somewhere, I thought to the PATCO unitl he turned to board the Blue line. I'm sure he was a nice guy, in his own way. He held the door open twice, despite his obvious desire to scamper off to wherever he was headed at 10:50 AM. Visiting my grandmother is always a pleasure, although I haven't anything against her and realize that none of this was her fault. She has no control over the 3 hour drive through the urbanized desolation of North Jersey; a landscape made bleak by its population of thousands, each a silent motorist elbowing his way through the traffic. The endless stacks of containers call for a use, perhaps as low income rural housing? They already use them for storage. How would you make them weatherproof, though? Rt. 17 had us meet a National Wholesale Liquidators, a massive store of size equal or greater than that of the Springfield Mall. The high ceilings gave an impression of the warehouse reborn, populated by listlessly scurrying knots of shoppers, despite the building's apparent recency. The storefront looked vaguely similar to the Home Depot on Rt. 70. There's no end to what they stocked, really, and we got Turkish Delight for ourselves and Nonpariels for my grandmother.
She's always loved dark chocolate. The Maple Glen ElderCare Center was no different than usual, and no less than 3 different senior citizens asked me to drive them home. I always get that, for some reason. We spent most of the time outside, and I had the pleasure of hearing my mother recount the story of my dad's business for the billionth time.
It's already degraded into a routine, yet each time I strain to hear what's next, as though some new development looms large. I'm explaining all of this to another version of myself, nestled securely in some region I'll never explore, disguised as a person I'll never meet. Maybe he [or she? ] is holding the answer booklet, paging through it expectantly. I imagine it's neat and old, with a seriff font on crisp white paper yellowed on the edges.
The type of book you'd expect to find at a library book sale for $.30, lodged alongside an abandoned Shakespeare and an outdated biology textbook with a slightly torn cover. The Shakespeare juts out slightly, and the oversized bio text leans over them both in a maternally protective guesture. From most angles, you'd never even notice The Answer Booklet. 
