routine

When I lived in London (and I wish it had been longer than four months and not four years ago) I took the same trains at about the same time three days a week to work at a magazine office in North London. Three days. Same lines. Same time. And it was a couple months in that I realized I never ran into the same people. I was amazed I never saw at least one familiar face in all that travel. And then the same week I realized this, I was boarding the train when someone from my office (was his name Graham? it is English enough) tapped me on the shoulder and offered the "Hiya, Lynette" I'd been waiting for. And the next day I ran into my friend Antony rounding the corner a block away from where I lived. It felt magical to run into someone. In my mind, that is the definition of a big city.

When I was driving back into Des Moines, heading west on I-80 the summer after I lived in London, I was almost to Ankeny when I saw the one skyscraper Des Moines can truly offer the skyline. I almost cried I was so excited to be back to my church, my ministry, my home. That one tall building among the fields is how I define a small city.

The past few weeks I've been taking the no. 20 bus west into downtown, Monday through Friday, usually boarding at 8.28am. I get back on the bus heading east at approximately 1:03pm. Though the routine is new, there are already a handful of faces I recognize. We ride the bus together, cross the same street after getting off at the same stop. She is blind. He is always wearing jeans and adidas soccer shoes. There are handfuls of others who still register as strangers, but peering out the bus window on two separate occasions I saw people I actually knew, first from work then from school, and Portland began to feel much smaller than I anticipated.

In college I kept being tricked into thinking I saw people from high school or church back home on campus. I thought it came from a desire to bring the disparate parts of my life into one social circle. But now, surprised by the familiarity my routine is offering three weeks in, I seem to want more anonymity, especially when traveling about. I want to find the little pockets of the city where I am known rather than feeling recognized along the way.