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Tag: Muni

Happy 100

Muni J-L-NMuni’s 100th Birthday. We got free rides today. Hooray!

Dore said they should scroll “Happy Birthday Muni” instead of “Go Giants” or “Go Forty-Niners” on the buses.

There should be birthday cakes and balloons and flowers and champagne.

There should be bands playing at major bus stops.

I guess we’d have to be satisfied with the exhibits on the transit shelters along Market Street.

None of the bus drivers had uttered a word about the special occasion. None of them looked particularly jubilated. Most of the buses had a piece of scrap paper over the fee machine, as if it was broken and we were lucky to get a free ride.

Management!

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TREASURES FROM THE MUNI ARCHIVE at THE SAN FRANCISCO RAILWAY MUSEUM, streetcar.org; Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen.

 

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The #11 Bus

Stick shift and bad back do not make good bedfellows.  But I’m the kind of person who likes to sit in front of the computer until the last minute and then dashes out the door.  When I am forced to abandon my “third leg”  because of back spasms I have to reevaluate my priorities.

The world has always been what it is.  Only when I enter it at a different portal do I notice new things like fresh air, the fog, the wind, sunshine, the moon and the rhythm of my heart.  As a poet I write about these elements often enough.  But they are through the imagination and not so much the body.  Taking the bus I find an entire community of its own as we rub shoulders and smell each other’s odor and listen to each other’s conversation.  A long walk navigating between people and animals, observing the glorious old cinemas that have deteriorated into garages and sundry stores on Mission Street, I find my slowing metabolism speeds up.  It is all good.  #11, as we call legs, is the bus I’m taking these days.  Unlike Muni, I can depend on them.

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