The Company We Keep

A few evenings ago I was contentedly riding home on the city bus, indulgently buried in a volume of Macaulay after a day spent mercilessly buried by my study for the bar.  In a few minutes' time I was roused from my reverie 'mid rolling English prose by a very animated conversation carrying on around me.  Across the aisle a tremendous female was intensely declaiming with great vigor and small grammar, punctuated by occasional murmurs of assent or sympathy from a gentleman behind me.

"He wants me to send him a hundred dolla's a month!" milady thundered.  "And I says to mysel', 'Man!!  This is gonna be one expensive prison term!!!"

"Yi-ah," agreed milord.

"And that judge--he wanted five thousand dolla's for bail!!" milady continued, incredulous and perspiring.  "Who ever heard of a five thousand dolla' bail for domestic violence?!?!"

"It's on account," reflected her interlocutor, "of all the people that's gettin' killed these days."

"Hmmmph," conceded the lady.  "But five thousand dolla's!?!?  Well, anyways," she went on, "I'm only gonna send him a hundred dolla's a month until they start sendin' in them Christmas packages.  Once they start sendin' him them Christmas packages, he's only gonna get FIFTY dolla's a month!!!"

"Yi-ah," sighed the gentleman behind me.  "But they don't make them Christmas packages like they used to, either."

Indeed they don't. 

Macaulay and I got off at the next stop, excluded too soon from this feast of reason and this flow of soul.