Riding The Bus

*I wrote this one time when I had only been awake for about three minutes. I guess I have less of a filter at 7 am. I could edit it, but somebody told me to try writing right when I woke up, this is what we got*

Once upon a time I had to ride the bus. Well, had to makes me sound like a martyr. I got to ride the bus? I suppose got to makes it sounds nice. I paid the city of Denver and they would send a person to pick up me and a bunch of other people and drive me around. I (insert completely neutral verb) to ride the bus.

It’s rare that I really desire to start a conversation with somebody in such a setting. Nobody ever has anything good to say and is just talking for their own benefit. With the crowd that rode my bus, this was probably because their brain was fried from drugs and they had no social cues. Now, if I was reading a book and somebody noted how they had read that book, I would most likely be happy to have a conversation. I think you need to identify some point of common ground in starting a conversation. I once sparked the interest of a young woman on the bus based on the fact that we were both white and there was rarely anybody who was white on the bus. I received her phone number under the guise of a business contact and we went to coffee and talked about work for three minutes and then our social lives. But hey, in the moment, being white was unique enough to build a connection.

I was never sure if I liked the bus or not. I liked decompressing after work on my way home, that was for sure. One thing that I hated was waiting for the bus. I hate waiting for anything. I knew that it took me 2 minutes to get to the bus stop from my house if I jogged. This meant leaving the house every day at 7:07 to catch the 7:09. If the bus driver had been comfortable with me hopping on without the bus stopping as it turned the corner, I would have done so as to facilitate a speedy transition.

One day, a woman at the front of the bus was going on about how hard her life was and how she was going back to school and trying to raise her kids. At this point I was able to take a break from thinking about sports and not talking to everybody in order to listen to her. Well, I was more forced to take this break. Perhaps a stronger man could have continued in his thoughts while she yelled, but I was not that man.

At this point in my life I received some smug sense of satisfaction from printing off parts of scripture at work and taking it home with me. This was before I had a bible phone, so this helped me read the bible on the bus.

I don’t know why, but I decided that I wanted to give her some money. I don’t think it was much, maybe 40 or 60 dollars. When she got off the bus, I walked up to her and said, “excuse me ma’am, this is yours.” I had enclosed the money in the 15 or so pages that contained whatever section of the Gospel I was reading at the time. She didn’t even look me in the eye, said “thank you,” took it and walked off. As if it was indeed something she had dropped earlier or we had some prearranged meeting on the bus for me to give her something that was due to her. I derive all of those conclusions based on the sense she gave me that she deserved what I was giving her.

It sort of made me angry. I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting. I was just going off of a little intuition that perhaps she needed the pick me up or a little help. I think I always want this moment where I do something brief that hits the nail right on the head. You know, like walking up to a stranger and saying, “it wasn’t your fault and I am sure he loved you.” Then she breaks out into tears because that is what she has been needing to hear for the last 10 years. God, even my acts of giving are marred with selfishness.

I don’t know why I wrote about that today. Well, it actually came because I wrote down “once upon a time” and then tried to remember something that happened in my life that would fit in that scenario.

Give it a shot. Once upon a time...