Ring the Bell If You Smell

I was standing at a bus stop in Los Angeles, when an elderly lady showed up, carrying a big plastic bucket. It was covered by a newspaper, but I was still able to see that it was full of feces, of all things. It was a hot day, so a couple flies landed on it right away.

The woman caught my confused stare and smiled. Turned out she also spoke Russian and was coming back from the Griffith Park horse stables, where they let her pick up some horse manure as often as she needed. She confessed that she was using it to fertilize tomatoes growing on her balcony, so they end up being gigantic.

I wasn't sure how the bus driver and other passengers would react to that, so I asked her to cover the bucket a little better and even helped her out with the task. For the first several minutes on the bus, nobody seemed to care, but then a well-dressed young man sitting across the aisle from her caught a whiff of the poop and confronted the woman. Her English wasn't great, and she was too slow to react, so the guy complained to the bus driver. The operator just shrugged it off and informed him that he knew that lady and she was going to get off the bus within the following several minutes. The guy produced a bottle of cologne, sprayed the air around himself, and sent visual daggers in the lady’s direction. There were not many more available seats around, so I guess he couldn’t just move towards the back of the bus.

The old lady noticed that the young man was upset, so she asked me to explain to him in English that she wasn't just some weirdo and needed those feces to fertilize her tomatoes and felt sorry it was disturbing for him. My detailed explanation and apologies didn't satisfy the guy, so he dialed a number on his phone. "Mom! I can't believe you advised me to take a bus! Can you imagine, there is a crazy old woman on the bus, who literally carries a bucket of horse shit with her! Gross! I will never take a bus again! What the fuck!” He hung up angrily and rolled his eyes. The people around him began chuckling.

The lady was staring at him with curiosity during the whole phone chat and then asked me to interpret for her what he was saying. As a linguist, sometimes I have to soften the language when interpreting, so I switched to the professional mode for a second. I was deeply embarrassed by the whole situation, but was able to come up with something quick and not offend her by the truth. "He was actually pretty impressed by your fertilizing idea, so he told his Mom to use horse manure in her garden, too. She said that she was aware of that and that he was not telling her anything new. That’s why he rolled his eyes and hung up. Sounds like parents never like taking any advice from their children.”

That last line appeared quite entertaining and probably true for the lady, so she burst out laughing. The young man kept checking his watch and visibly couldn’t wait to get off that bus. At some point soon, the friendly old lady showed him thumbs up (oops!) and left, but the young man was glancing at me angrily till the end of the ride, as if I had something to do with that "shitty story." Well, I guess I did, plus it’s always the interpreters who get blamed if a bilingual interaction becomes awkward!