"The Boni Waiting Shed"

The Boni Waiting Shed

By:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr.

There is a waiting shed in Boni Avenue. It’s the one that stretches a few feet from Edsa itself and ending near the entrance of Robinson's Pioneer. A long waiting shed where people wait. A lot of people wait for other people. Some wait for things. Some wait for nothing.

I sit there in warm and cold times, the slender roof shelters me from heat and rain and my observations continue. When people all around you are in a rush, you seem to be suspended in some time warp. There are attractive office girls running and mothers off to bring their children to school. The buzzing of cars turning right to Pioneer and The buses from Edsa a mere few feet away from me screeching to a halt to discharge passengers in a hurry lest the MMDA watch dogs catch them and give them a ticket for illegal unloading and loading. I sit near a magtataho at times and I see that with the fast influx of people comes a fast influx of trade for him as well. He hands them the taho cups out 2 or 3 at a time for people who might or might have not had a decent breakfast and the taho in all its soya goodness is still filling.

The police who are stationed to the area often sit at the edges of the long waiting shed waiting for a random bus to board and check , mainly to calm a populace that are weary of bombs and other terrorist threats. Recently there has been fewer and fewer of them as things have gotten back to normal and they can again be reassigned to other tasks. Life does go on in that waiting shed and if you stay long enough you actually feel like you are in some stop motion camera experiment where you stand still and the rest of the world moves without you in a dizzying blur. Those who stay in the shed continue to wait , for associates to have meetings with , once a couple of very active 60 year old women were waiting for the other members of their aerobics group and it is interesting to note that even in there advanced ages they seem to be moving as fast as the other people around them. You have your smokers and non smokers who try to ignore each other and the lovers who are trying to speak calmly but you cannot help but see that one of them is crying in frustration. A normal scene and not the last one in that waiting shed. I wonder what thing I will see next in that very interesting place.