fwriction

On her blog, HearMeBrant, Zigman writes some wonderful short pieces. “Losing a Pole,” though, struck a cord and has yet to leave me. (Perhaps, in a way, I feel I lost a pole, too, in Harvard Square.) Zigman, author of the novel Animal Husbandry, explores so poignantly the difficulties of what “losing a pole” can mean:

“And we’re always waiting for the strange guy to get on and sit right up by the driver and ask the same question over and over and over:

“Didja evah lose a pole down by the stah mahket?“

I’m not sure how many trips it took for us to understand exactly what he was asking the driver — a Boston accent is hard enough to understand without the overlay of a mentally-challenged twang — but eventually we figured out that the question had something to do with the two poles on top of the bus that connected it to the network of electrical wires that powered it and with the supermarket we passed right before crossing the Watertown line into Cambridge.”