Trekhprudny Lane

High-strung today. Everything feels more poignant. The anklet stockings of the old women -- not nude, not subtle, and not, I imagine, breathable -- seem like a failed gesture. Not toward fashion, but toward gentility. Sad too are the people I don't know but I see again and again, inexplicably, as if this was a small town. 

Poverty manifested in the teeth and the shoes, workmen actually covered in actual dust -- so much Dickens in Moscow. There was an elderly one-man band in the underpass who, like half the people I see here, seem to invite curiosity through their very strangeness but then prove impervious, closed to contact. He played American standards on an abridged trumpet, a twelve-note keyboard, and a tiny snare drum, shorter than his knee. From behind inch-thick spectacles, his reaction to my rather pathetically large donation, or to EB's dancing, was impossible to read. 

But thank goodness for the people who demand "why?!" of their dogs. For God's sake we have a right to an explanation.  

And the B bus again. Thanks too for those self-appointed custodians of us, clucking nodding ladies who get me and the girls and the stroller on and off at the right stops, like the fare-gatherers and change-givers riding the marshrutki. Polish husband says disparagingly "they are so soviet," as if having a uniformed ticket collector, and a chance to cheat the system, marked a higher stage on the evolutionary path West.