Conversation on a Bus

It's late evening. I find a seat on the bus home and
eager to escape into my own world after a day in the city,
open The Moscow Times, a British funded rag with mainly
business orientation and essentially without anything
one might call news--rumors, trivia, obscure movements
in the financial world of Russia not counted. A man in a
floppy hat, looking rather intellectual sounds down beside
me and strikes up a conversation.
"What does the English word "riverstar" mean?" he asks me.
"There is no such one word, " I answer "but the combination means...etc."
He argues with me a bit about this and tells me it's a navigation system
for airplanes and he saw it once somewhere.
OK.
Then: "Tell me, is there a store in America where you can buy 30
different kinds of tree sap?"
No.
How is that? He insists there must be.
I compromise: not to my knowledge.
He: Tree sap is good for people, cures you of all
kinds of things, oak sap and pine sap and all the
others are good. (Girls sitting across giggle and say, "Especially
for mental problems, right?") He asks about maple sap. I tell
him it mainly appears as syrup. "Oh, syrup -- and why not just
sap?"
Undeterred he goes on. All with a grave face.
"Indians could drink tree sap and change the color of their
skin, don't you think?"
No! And what stop was that? I yell.
The girls tell me, still giggling. I missed my stop thanks to this -intellectual- conversation,
accidentally knock his floppy hat off as I run to the bus door
not go yet another stop out of my neighborhood.
I make my way home through the dark night, checking street
names with passersby as I go. No signs are visible, just speeding
cars.
A few days later, I see my floppy hatted conversationalist, but
avoid any eye contact and keep on my way, lesson learned. Never talk
to strangers, as Mikhail Bulgakov wrote about Woland in Moscow.
Hmmm, Woland was an intellectual...and wore a funny kind of hat.