Look Out for Flying Nail Bits

It's funny how the morning bus riders, at least on the 56 in West Seattle, think of the bus as the extension of their bathrooms, a place to continue their morning primping and prep work for the day. Yesterday, in one seven-mile ride, my fellow riders included:

• An older woman who clipped her fingernails for 25 minutes, with nail bits flying all around the bus. One landed in the lap of the middle-aged man next to me who just looked down, muttered softly, "Really?" and brushed it away.
• A young woman whose spiky stilletto boots had gotten wet with the first rain of fall (yes, in Seattle fall comes in August), so she unzipped her boot, flapped it in the aisle to air it out, and then while she was at it, decided to straighten the left leg of her pantyhose. And as she straightened the foot, then the ankle, then the calf, she realized she might as well straighten the whole leg. While she was deft and brisk about it, one doesn't expect to see someone else's Spanx at eye level, at least at that hour of the morning.
• Three guys who collapsed their drenched umbrellas and then shook them out, right in the aisle, like they were retrievers after a swim, so we could experience the rain outside all over again.
• A young professional type, who was reading "The Art of Machiavelli," I kid you not, who did the usual things like check his phone and slick back his hair, and then ended his bus ritual by pulling off his wedding band--and slipping it into an inside zippered pocket.