7.27.2006

1 Mulligan for Grandpa Metro



There's this old guy who stands in front of the Davis T stop every morning and hands out the Metro. He looks kinda like what Grandpa Addams would look like if he lost 40 pounds, grew a few inches, and ditched the cape.

He yells, with craaazy syllabic elongation: "meeeeeeeeeetro paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapaaahhh... get yo' meeeeeeeeeeeeetrooooo paaaaaaaaaaapaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh...."

It's cool and everything, makes me think of ol'times when I would get up at dawn and shear the sheep and play stickball with the neighborhood boys and try to put trinkets in an old tree trunk while deftly avoiding Boo Radley.

But, like, so, this morning, I walk by him, and I actually want a meeeeeeetrroooo papaaaahhhh. But he's going all Ray Charles head-fake on me and refuses to catch my glance for long enough to give me a damn paper. So I walk a little ways down the street to the actual Metro box-stand-distribution-thing (what's this called? yea, that.) and begin to open it, and he comes shuffling after me: "young lady, young lady in pink..." and hands me one. But my hand is already in the box, clasping my own meeeeeetrrrroooo paaaapaaah. So now I have two.

It was like kinda like Manny and Coco bungling it up in centerfield on Sunday. Except that while their mishap resulted in an inside-the-park-HR, I simply left with two periodicals.

Wow, um, uh, yeea.

**flickr nod to Harvard_Avenue.

5 Comments:

Blogger Ron Newman said...

Hi. I was directed to your blog from Universal Hub. As a Davis Square resident, I'd love to read your blog entry. Unfortunately you have chosen a foreground color of dark gray, against a black background. So I think I'll go elsewhere....

1:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The guy who hangs outside the College Ave entrance? Yeah, I like that old guy. I don't think he's an actual Metro paper-giver-outer, cause there's an actual giver-outer inside and he has to wear the vests and everything. I asked him once if he minded the competition and he said "No, not really."

I've come to believe the older fellow just likes to stand outside giving out the paper. He likes to chat and tell the ladies they have beautiful smiles. Maybe he has nothing else to do, maybe he lives in the elderly housing just down College Ave, and maybe he makes his own fun every morning by playing paperboy. Maybe so or maybe not, but I think it's a comforting image, in a strangely sad way.

3:29 PM  
Blogger jayniek said...

spatch,
i completely agree... it's a throwback to a time i guess i never really lived through, but i really like him being there.
He's one of those daily background characters who you just come to expect to be there... and it would be a marked loss if he didn't show up to his "post" one day...

3:42 PM  
Blogger Ron Newman said...

Let me partially apologize for, and explain, my earlier comment.

When I first looked at the page (from work), it was with Firefox on Linux. Unfortunately, this browser shows almost no contrast between the text and the background, making the page nearly unreadable.

Now that I'm home, I'm looking at it again with Safari on Mac OS X. It looks much better (more contrasty) with that browser.

I don't know why this difference exists, but you may want to take a look at it.

12:28 AM  
Blogger jayniek said...

Hey Ron-

No prob. Thanks for giving it another shot :)

I'm admittedly a mac snob; so, left to my own devices, I'm apt to cater to the mac-users among us.

But I'll definitely look into it... thanks!

9:53 PM  

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