the ride.

Since mid-September I have been gloriously free of public transportation. For several months I commuted via a lovely one mile walk. These days, a zippy bike ride. But this morning, it was raining hard and I needed to wear something nice. I also needed my hair to not be a hot-frizzy-helmet-mess. So I took the bus.

I love the freedom of using my own legs to get wherever I need to go. I also love exercise that has a purpose, i.e. getting me to work. But this morning I remembered with a rush the infinite wealth that lies on one short bus ride, the ammo, the people. There’s so much to see and listen to and speculate about and imagine. I don’t particularly enjoy riding the bus, but it still fires up my writer/thinker brain.

The bus cleared out at the stop where I got on, so I sat in the front, next to a large man with a tall umbrella and a heavy head of fuzzy black hair. It had been raining, and in the moments his umbrella was closed, before he got on the bus, a dozen tiny drops caught in the net of his hair, like drops of dew on a morning spiderweb. He let me get on the bus first. He heaved and sighed until I got off. He looked up at the ceiling and out the window behind him and he just sighed these deep, anxious sighs.

When I reached my stop and the bus halted with a bump, he held out his arm, straight across the aisle, like a rail, offering it to the woman behind me, something to hold onto. People are always falling all over each other on the bus, and pretending that it's perfectly normal to stumble and cram oneself against strangers. She didn’t take his arm.

I don’t know why he was sighing. Maybe he felt ill, maybe he was tired, maybe he had some mental illness or anxiety, maybe something terrible had just happened to him. Possibilities. But I am interested in that moment, that one very moment, when he left the sighing walls of his head and stuck out his arm for the woman who was stumbling in front of him. I am interested in that spark, that switch. I’m interested in that story.