Atticus   

A man dressed in drag was on my bus today. It wasn’t performing-later-at-The-Manhole drag, though. It was a frightening effort that said, “I’m unsuccessfully self-medicating with multiple prescriptions.”

I tried to imagine which Goodyear service center would hire him, since, other than the Bernadette Peters wig and matching lipstick, it’s exactly the place he looked like he’d work. From the neck down, he could’ve been Dwayne Schneider from TV’s “One Day at a Time.”

It reminded me of a guy I’d forgotten about from two weekends ago. I’d driven to Highlands Ranch so my friend Denise, who was visiting me from back home, could spend a couple of hours with friends of hers from the days of her three-year mission stint in Japan. We passed a Tattered Cover bookstore on the way to their home, and I made a mental note to kill time there while the three of them reminisced.

After browsing for almost 90 minutes, I went to the register to check out. A man clearly in the middle of a hormone regimen greeted me from the other side of the counter. A word I’d heard to describe his state of flux entered my head: transitioning.

It struck me as funny to remember it this morning because I’m in the middle of a book that features proposed legislation incentivizing suicide to Baby Boomers. The marketing term for the practice? Transitioning.