RSS SPIRIT

Maybe it wasn't this crowded




So it took awhile for the 65 bus to come. I did not mind, the sun felt nice. Little did I know what lay in wait for me. It was, as the title suggests, a bus. A bus without pity and without conscience. 20 blocks separated me and a meeting, a business meeting. Then, well it started.

We got on the bus and blew right through the next stop. Foolishly I thought, "I am going to be early. Should I get a coffee? Or is it too late in the day?"

Our bus looked like many on the streets that day. But something unbelievable was about to hit it. And when it did, none of us would ever forget it. At least not until a couple days after.

A full sixth grade class waited at a stop ahead. A cry from inside the bus, a gasp, too late, they were upon us. Everywhere there were 6th graders and three teachers on a field trip. Yes, each kid had to insert a card into the machine. Yes, each kid was a reminder of the lowest level of Dante's inferno - junior high school.

Terror overtook me like a sundown in Alaska. I would be late, to a business meeting. I had no phone with me. And then yes, a gangly Polish kid with bad skin sat down next to me. Like refugees from a flood, oddly shaped people arrived from the front of the bus to escape the swell of 11 year olds.

If it were only the large class from CRR Middle School. If only. For there rained upon us, stop after stop, bus riders like a fecundity of cloggage. A gaggle of Indian women. Two hipster types. Old black persons in sharp looking chapeaus. A burly Hispanic man with wiry chest hair, a rash on his face and tattoos that looked to be from the Guadalajara Merchant Marines.

I wept. Inside. The bad skin, 11 year olds in every direction, the bus submerged in cars and trucks stuck in traffic, and yes we made every stop, damn near.

Then something arrived. Something some people call grace. It entered along with an extra-sized black man wearing a denim jacket, a shirt with denim pocket accents and a denim tie. It was around the same time I saw a beautiful 11 year old face, yacking at her friend. Right when I thought the Polish lankster with bad skin played footsie with me. Wait a minute, no, he was just shifting feet.

Outside the bus there loitered life so called, a foul calling indeed. People, i.e. hosts of pain, shuffled down the street. Inside the bus a new world was being built. It made me think of Michael Jackson. Mainly because the girl standing in front of me had a Michael Jackson nose, white version.

All of us traveled on a very special mother ship. Everybody felt it. Slowly we crawled, like hopeful monsters, toward a re-eden over an industrial bridge. Like Adam and Eve, hand in hand, an arc rowed toward an answer to our pleas.

The old black people with sharp hats got off first. Then the hipster boy and girl exited. Their artfully chosen shoulder bags crossed paths. The burly Mexican man made aggressive smiles and hellos at a woman as she exited the bus. A guy and I looked at each other and wondered if we were in another epoch altogether.

I was early to my appointment. Can you believe that? I exited a stop after my stop on purpose so I could walk a bit. How did such terror and joy inhabit the same bus? How did this unspeakable supernatural phenomenon descend upon us? The pimply Pole or the portly 11 year old Gameboy player might know the answer.


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