Tangled up in blue, indeed.

On the bus this morning a woman, middle-aged yelled at the driver calling him an "insensitive man," because he failed to let her in at the stop light a block earlier, therefore making her run to the next stop. "You’re an insensitive man!" she yelled as she boarded, breathing hard from the one block run. As another passenger "Shhh’d" her the driver simply responded, "Well, you crazy, lady."

On the other side of town a cell phone that had started ringing somewhere in the bus behind me still wasn’t stopping. Finally someone said "Is that yours?" another said, "No." Then someone else asked, "Well is it yours?" to someone else. They said no. By Central Park West the entire bus came to the realization that someone had left it behind. The woman sitting across from me took it upon herself to pick it up when it rang again. "Well I don’t know who your boyfriend Rob is but he seems to have left his phone on our bus." The woman told Rob’s girlfriend that she lived at 77th and 2nd and would leave the phone with her doorman within the hour. "You tell Rob he’s lucky I’m so nice."

On the downtown 1 train the little girl sitting next to me lost her earring. She asked her mother where it went, repeatedly. "Do you see it?" she asked her. "Do you know where it is?" The girl was devastated. She was about nine and she said it was a Minnie Mouse earring. I tried my hardest not to get involved, seriously concentrating on my book until the girl literally got down on the floor of the train and started looking under my legs. "Excuse me?" I asked. "But my Minnie earring," she said looking up at me desperately. Her eyes were pleading and her mother, who seemed only willing to keep asking things like, "Well are you even sure you put them on this morning?" obviously wasn’t going to help. I’ve lost so many things that the sadness in her face over this one little thing made my feel obligated to help. So there we were, me in my skirt and her in her jeans, kneeling down on the floor of the downtown 1 train looking under people’s legs.

We finally found it right before she got off the train at 28th street. "Thank you so so so so so much," she said, and I just smiled and thought that it was nice to know that sometimes not everything get lost forever.

On the way home I got off the 6 train (how many trains in one day!) at 68th street and the guy behind me was singing. I had already been wedged into the train, pushed in really, at 51st street next to a man in a dark blue pin striped suit who overtly placed his entire right hand over half of my backside with a feeble excuse of, "Oh, sorry," as though it was a mutual understanding that in crowded situations something like that was bound to happen by accident. I gave him an oh-sure-save-it-for-your-wife eye roll before we parted ways.

But as soon as I hit the stairs on the way up towards the fresh cold air of Lexington Avenue, I heard it begin. It was a little screechy and totally out of key, She was workin' in a topless place, and I stopped in for a beer. I just kept lookin' at the side of her face in the spotlight so clear...

And so he sang Bob Dylan, poorly, and was of course going my way. Everyone who passed us couldn’t help but laugh at his horrible voice, obnoxiously loud and blatantly butchering a classic as he trailed behind me.

And later on as the crowd thinned out, it's just about to do the same. She was standing there in back of my chair said to me, "Don't I know your name?"

I turned around, exasperated, wanting to gauge exactly how much longer this was going to go on for. At which point he smiled, stopping singing and said, "Muttered somethin' underneath my breath, she studied the lines on my face. I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe..."

After a yelling woman and ringing cell phone and lost earrings, I wasn’t at all in the mood to be tangled up in blue.

"Maybe some other time," I said (and he laughed) because commuting today had been enough.