Yesterday the weekend bus disruption was the Rocky Run, a race honoring a 1976 movie set in Philadelphia in which a boxer ran in a completely impossible and nonsequential course all over the sights of the city, including up the Art Museum steps.

All over my general area, tired people were walking, usually with two or three large and ornamental medals hanging around their necks.

I resonate with that. One of my favorite things about competing was the “shinies” I got, and I would wear them proudly. A symbol that I had been somewhere and done something was always welcome.

Under normal circumstances, going to the library is no big deal for me. In fact, I walked there yesterday. It was sunny out, the Parkway was pretty. The library (which, like a lot of city buildings, turns on its heat in October and then doesn’t turn it off until May) was ferociously hot, though.

It wasn’t until I went out with my books to catch the bus that I realized my mistake. All the buses were detoured. I am very tired right now. Whenever I get a cold, even a mild one, I am sick for weeks because of my asthma. So I went up to the bus stop as usual. And then the buses went somewhere else entirely.

I sighed, and walked up 21st Street, past other people waiting hopefully for the bus, including a guy with two Trader Joe bags, and I turned left at Fairmount Avenue. Usually the buses converge back on their routes by Fairmount.

Threading my way through the bemedaled crowds on the sidewalk, I heard a woman ringing a bike bell and saying, “Excuse me! Coming through!” She was riding a rental bike. As she passed me, I yelled, “Get off the sidewalk,” and she did.

“I can’t believe people,” said the guy with the Trader Joe bags who, like me, had given up on the bus. We chatted about people thinking they can ride bikes on the sidewalk.

We got to the street where the buses usually go back to their routes when there’s a parade or a race, and I sat on a bollard. He put down his bags and said it was just too much to walk the whole way with his groceries. He was perhaps in his fifties, a trim Black guy with a salt-and-pepper beard. He showed me his find of the day from Trader Joe, some salmon snacks. He said Trader Joe was out of plastic forks, so he couldn’t eat them on the way. He told me where to find them in the store. I don’t much like fish, but it was nice of him.

“Do you think the Rocky movie makes any money off these runs?” he said. I doubted it, but I told him that Stallone had done all right from it, because he wrote the screenplay and insisted that he star in it. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

“People used to run up the steps before the movie,” I said. “The movie turned it into something tourists did.”

The 49 bus came, and we got on. Our bus driver was not in a good mood and wouldn’t look at me or respond when I said hello. They often aren’t in a good mood on race days.

But I had had my social interaction for the day, so I was content. I had been somewhere and I had done something.