Bus Trippin'

There are basically three types of folks who ride the bus: Students, commuters, and people who are poor and/or broke.(Ok, add in a few anti-authoritarians and carbon-footprint-shrinkers from time to time as well). I’ve taken a lot of bus, and cycled through each of these categories several times over in my ridership. I’ve noticed that odd events and people tend to pop up among the cross section of humanity on the bus.
It makes sense. Basically, the bus is a rolling incubator wherein hot meat bags with mutually exclusive worldviews are methodically aggravated while being forced to touch one another. We all do our best.
I took an evening bus from Mt. Vernon to Charles Village tonight. That trip is maybe 10 or 12 stops, like probably about 2 city miles. This 20-minute ride is a study in bizarre human interactions, because the bus is inexplicably packed. We pass Penn Station and trade in one batch of commuters for another – the second is the larger group and folks have to stand. We’re all inadvertedly jostling somebody.

Two especially unusual things unfold.
1). When we get to North Avenue the driver puts on the hazards, takes a cell phone call, gets up and says “Ya’ll have to get on the bus behind me” in his inside voice, and leaves the bus (which continues running). The people near the front slowly collect themselves while we in the middle ask each other what he said; we all spill out onto the corner North and Charles, across from New York Chicken. We shuffle onto the #11 that has just pulled bumper to bumper with the, uh...#11, and sift ourselves into new seats. The original driver gets back onto his bus and drives off, #11 TOWSON still burning right on into the night.

2). A few stops past a dude gets on the overpeopled #11 TOWSON SEQUEL with a full size office chair. It barely fits in the aisle by the driver. Bigger than a lot of wheelchairs I see.
A lady greets him, says “You always got somethin’, doncha Sam?” and squeezes up to stand beside him. They chat, he hands her a takeout container, they get off together just past the Safeway.

So there’s the office chair situation, that was weird. I get that, though, I took our Christmas tree home on the bus one year. You ain’t got private transportation, you do what you need to do.

Also puzzling was the sorta mismatched pair they were. Lady was a wide-eyed young white coed with a backpack, bouncy hair, and a cutie tiny tee. Sam was a mid-50s black dude in an oily grey uniform, smile worn out like he’d had a mighty long day, toting that office chair via bus this evening. Looks to me like they have wildly different profiles all around; they strike me as two people unlikely to end up in a conversation by design.
OK, yeah, who do I know myself that might surprise a voyeuristic observer? I can think of twenty people in a heartbeat, and whether we harmonize or clash flickers with each of my/their personas. It made me check my assumptions, which by all standards of decency it should. But then I just made up a story in my head which justified my original guesses. My grandma taught me to play peoplewatch in airports, the story is the payoff of the game. It should be somewhere between measured speculation and reckless fiction, either end of the spectrum can be entertaining. I chose the version that seemed most likely to me.

They were friendly but not casual. I reckon they are neighbors from adjacent blocks in this “transition neighborhood”; It’s pretty mixed-income, multi-racial, mix of houses and apartment low-rises. I say she’s an undergrad from JHU, studying late at the Peabody library -- never left Toledo until last fall, when her folks helped her find her first apartment in a security building near the supermarket. He’s supporting his son and his sister-in-law’s kid on the street where he grew up, running a Greenmount bodega thrift store that the current economy is treating rough.
They wash up, each in the tide of their individual routine, at the same bus stop on the regular. Dude and Lady took the audacious and less-traveled path of acknowledging recognition for each other one day. Now they’re bus friends! Maybe they know the content of each others’ days, a little. Connect in their frustration after a damnable early bus passes them up.

Our tormented city heals itself block by block, between people of good intentions who share a route, who frequently waste the same scrap of empty time standing next to the same sign.

All hail the power of public transportation.