Buckets

That is a metro bridge, a bridge that subway trains run across. While significant parts of the DC subway system are underground, parts of the system are above ground.  It is easy to tell the above ground sections from the below ground sections, if the section is sometimes in daylight, it is above ground. The underground sections lack daylight. Believe it or not a train operator explained that to a train full of Friday afternoon commuters recently.   This bridge is little used, it is a bypass to allow trains to change lines.  So, what are the buckets doing on the bridge?  It is a strange place for buckets.  It is someplace where few people will walk, meaning it is unlikely that anyone will kick the bucket there.

I am here, in  part because of subways.  No my parent's didn't meet on a subway train, I wasn't conceived on a subway train (far to exciting for my parents.) My great grandfather on my paternal grandmother's side, was a tunnel digger.  An English coal miner, who moved to North America to dig underground tunnels, including subway tunnels.  If he hadn't come to this country to dig tunnels, my grandmother would have grown up in west London, married a local bloke, and my father wouldn't have existed.  Hence I wouldn't be writing this.

When I was growing up, my father use to say, "never run after a streetcar or a woman."  It took me a long time to understand why my mother was upset when he said that.  She is wound kind of tight, so it never took much to set my mother off.  My father grew up in the burbs of Detroit, when Detroit had streetcars,  For years I though that she was upset by references to Detroit's lost streetcars (thank you GM - GM struck a deal to remove the tracks and repave the streets if Detroit would replace steet cars with modern buses.) Eventually I connected the dots, if the next street car is just the same, so is the next woman, maybe mom was not one-in-a-million.  Streetcars may be fungible, but life partners are not.  They are one-in-a-million.  My parents are coming up on 67 years, no one has kicked the bucket, maybe one was worth chasing after. I know I have found a sweet bear who was worth chasing and being chased by.