Walkabout: More ways than one, bus rides can be a moving experience
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One of the Port Authority's many crowded buses, their own little mini-societies.
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A middle-aged woman in career casual looks grimly at the purse on her lap as the bus doors open. A young mother struggles on board folding a stroller, with a toddler on one hip. The young woman shoehorns herself into a seat across from the purse lady and props the child on one leg.
The bus rumbles north. The mother raises a cell phone to her ear and the child starts to blubber. The kid's distress escalates, and soon she is screaming. The knee under her begins to bounce.
Purse lady is looking at the child. Her downturned slit of lips softens as she tries to gather the little face into her eyes. She leans forward and makes puckering motions with her mouth.
Soon she is rooting in her purse and pulls out a lollipop. Motioning to the mother with it, she raises her eyebrows. Still on the phone, the mother moves her head. Acquiescence.
The child reaches for the lollipop, and the bus is quiet.
At the next stop, a hub, 20 people file on from both doors and a few get off. One is the purse lady. As she stands, the young mother gives her a shy smile.
I am on this bus and have been on many North Side buses -- the 13, the 15, the 16, the 17 and, before that, the 500 -- on my way home from work on a cold or rainy evening. With few exceptions, these rides are crowded with weary people lugging kids or just their own tired bodies, jangled nerves and weary workday expressions, backpacks, briefcases and grocery bags banging against knees and backs. They are sometimes fraught with screaming kids or loud teenagers as the driver calls out, "Move to the rear, please!"
When someone does something like the purse lady did, it's an almost unconscious counterbalance to rescue a little world from its shifting, anonymous disorder.
Purse lady won't forget her small act, and neither will the young mother.
I won't forget the steadying hand of an older man as I was trying to get off a bus from near the back. The aisle was a scrum of passengers who hung onto rails and straps, curving into seated passengers trying to make their backsides smaller as I said "Excuse me, excuse me" behind them.
The bus lurched to a stop, and I bowled into the older man at the front.
"Sorry," I said.
He grabbed my arm then put his hand lightly on my shoulder.
"You OK?"
I smiled and said, "Thank you." He smiled back.
I alit on North Avenue filled with buoyancy. Why, I wondered? Have we become so lost in ourselves that just a little act of basic decency makes us giddy?
I began to think about it and decided no. They are not little acts.
The bus ride is a micro-drama with a beginning, a middle and an end, made up of acts of graciousness, understanding and courtesy.
It may not seem like much at the time: The unspoken "It's OK" when you cannot help nestling against a stranger when the bus is filled elbow to hip; the "Excuse me" that always gets a "No problem," said or not; the person who grabs a stroller and folds it for a burdened young mother; the young man or woman who stands for an elder; the eye contact you make with a hip-hop kid in ear buds moving his head back and forth -- you smile because you enjoy someone enjoying music, and he might smile back.
Every once in a while a jerk gets on the bus wanting to command everyone's attention with booming humor that isn't funny, or a group of loud teenagers gets profane.
But when I pan my memories of hundreds of bus rides, I can think of only a few marked by the callous, inane and discordant.
As I consider the possibility that our state will allow the draconian cuts threatened by the Port Authority to go into effect, I am sick. If you can't afford a car, don't have a ride, fear riding a bike and live too far from your job to walk, what in the world will you do?
That threat stops all consideration of the residual value, the other thing you lose when you lose a bus route -- the daily build-up of anonymous goodwill whose each act is like a sip of water.
Many sips are the essence of our shared humanity in a civil society.
First Published January 24, 2012 12:00 am
