Dreads

She's an Asian girl, which for me makes guessing her age very difficult.

Back in college I knew two Korean sisters. Once they playfully dared me to guess their ages, and I put them about 10 years younger than they were. They giggled, and I was terribly embarrassed.

So I won't even try to guess this girl's age. But she's young - still in school, apparently, based on what she's carrying - a couple of textbooks on being a dental assistant. She's also got a bag, slung over her shoulder, full of more books.

She's got a bandage on the tip of her finger; I can't help but wonder if she cut it on some poor kid's tooth.

I catch myself meditating on the mystery of youth and education: this young lady is overflowing with potential knowledge and is just on the cusp of real life. Post-secondary education is like that moment when you've just stepped out of your house into the pouring rain and you're struggling to open your new umbrella. But it's still kinda stuck together from being pressed in on itself for months as it sat in a rail container on a boat from China and then in a warehouse and then in a distribution centre and finally on a store shelf... while it's technically 'ready for use,' it's not really ready for use the first time you use it.

There's her stop.

Not being really satisfied with the story she gave me, I look for somebody else.

As soon as he boards the bus I know he's the one. A tall, somewhat intimidating looking mid-30's white man, his hair hangs in dreadlocks about a foot long. He's got a trim moustache and a beard with a ponytail. Yes, the beard has a ponytail. I can't think of another way to describe it. His hair is probably red when it's clean, but it appears brown in its current state.

His glasses are the most remarkable feature: instead of making his eyes look bigger, these are small, thick-rimmed frames with lenses about an inch wide and half an inch high, and they make his eyes look about half their normal size. It's an eerily freaky addendum to his already bizarre appearance.

He heads straight for where the future dental assistant was sitting, and I say to myself, "Please sit there, please sit there..." but he does something rather unexpected. He goes right for where she was sitting - an empty two-seater - but doesn't sit down. He stands right beside a perfectly good empty bench.

He's fairly close to me, so I count the pockets on his khaki cargo pants: sixteen. His shirt is a long, brown corduroy, and he's got a brown trench coat over it all. He seems rather mopey; a bitter soul who has concluded that he can never know joy.

He stands there for the duration of my bus ride, nearly perfectly obstructing my view of the whole bus, and I wonder if he has found me out and dressed so distinctly just so that he would appear odd enough to be noticed and end up on my blog. My mind starts to wander with this idea, and I wonder if he's stalking me.

Nah.

There's my stop. I walk past him as I disembark. My next bus comes within a few minutes and I hop on. My new bus echoes the path of my previous one for a few blocks, and who should board my bus a few stops later but Mr. Dreadlocks. He plods past me, his cloud of gloom wafting behind him.

There's my final stop. He has taken up his standing position again, right beside the rear door. I politely step around him and exit. A few paces later, I happen to look behind me.

He's there.

I quicken my pace for half a block and purposely do not head straight for home. Instead I act as if I'm trying to cross the street, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. He, too, is looking like he wants to cross the street.

At the last second I spin around and cut through a narrow parking lot. I'm walking faster now, and starting to sweat. I dare a glance behind me, expecting to see him come running at me.

He's there. Running straight towards me, and shouting obscenities. His dreads are whipping side to side as he speeds up, and his tiny little eyes are fixed on me. My heart leaps into my throat, and I burst into a panicked run, wishing that I were in better shape - my side starts to cramp within 30 seconds. He's catching up, and suddenly we're on the ground as he tackles me, a jumble of sweaty, profane, hate...

OK, that last paragraph wasn't true.

But it definitely wasn't boring.

American Traveler

I don't know if he's actually an American, but his overnight bag bears that label.

He's probably in his early 50's, and since he's on the bus that comes from the airport, I'm betting he's returning from a business trip. He's wearing brown shoes, tan dress pants, a tweed sport coat complete with leather patches on the elbows, a checkered blue collared shirt, but no tie - it's casual Friday, after all.

He's wholly unremarkable. With my dark sunglasses I'm able to point my head in a different direction and yet still observe him. Occasionally he scratches his head, or crosses his arms. At one point he even twiddles his thumbs. His shifts around in his seat a bit, and crosses his arms.

I stifle a yawn.

Every time the bus lurches to a stop he puts a hand on his overnight bag, which is standing upright on the floor beside his seat, to keep it from rocketing to the front of the bus.

Well, that's something, at least.

There's my stop. I'm fortunate with my connection today; my next bus pulls up right behind this one as I disembark. I climb on the new bus. The two buses follow the same route through downtown Winnipeg for a few blocks, so I can see my previous bus right in front of me.

His bus lurches to a stop again. I see him get off, leather patches and all. His American Traveler overnight bag has one of those retractable handles; he extends it and pulls the bag along behind him like it's a Red Flyer and he's four years old again.

By golly, was he boring.

Zambia

My morning bus is unusually full. As usual, I'm one of the last people to earn a seat partner, and much to my surprise, the person who opts to sit with me is a cute redhead in her early 20s. She's a very trendy dresser: a taupe wool overcoat, long purple silk scarf, and those thick-rimmed glasses that add about 40% to a person's cool factor.

In my bachelor days, I always had a thing for redheads. But the good Lord saw fit to hook me up with a blonde, and I've never looked back. Still, redheads stir me up in a manner over which I have little control.

So it is with concerted effort that I try to ignore her cuteness and her youth. But the discipline I'm forming within myself via this blog - to observe, to notice, to comment - kicks in and I can't help but saying to her, as more and more people board the bus until it's standing room only, "This must be what sardines feel like."

"What?" she asks, focusing her attention on me.

"This must be what sardines feel like," I repeat.

"Oh, this isn't that bad," she responds. "When I was in Zambia last year they'd fit way more people on."

"Really?" I say.

"Yep. This seat we're in would have three or four people in it, and the people standing would be pressed much more tightly than that."

"Wow. They must have a completely different understanding of personal body space than we do."

She nods. "They sure do."

"So what took you to Zambia?" I inquire.

"Oh, I did my internship in an office for a group supporting HIV/AIDS research and treatment. Just administrative stuff, nothing glorious," she replies. "I'd love to go back and work in development though, which is completely different from what I did. The way they live there is so drastically different from us. What we think is normal and important in life doesn't mean a thing to them."

"Yeah," I say. "When I was younger I read a LOT of comic books, and one day I felt convicted that I was spending $30 a month on Superman, when I could be sponsoring a child for the same amount. So I signed up for one in Burundi, and another a few years later in a refugee camp in Rwanda. The letters I get from them indicate that their society moves at a different pace and has completely different priorities. I'm definitely not rich by our society's standards, but they would look at my life and think I'm the wealthiest man they'd ever seen."

She nods. "And they don't consider themselves poor. The last thing the West needs to be doing is going in and telling them how to live, although they would certainly benefit from things like clean water." She turns the discussion on to me. "So what do you do?"

"I work in customer relations at a moving company. I'm amazed at how people get up in arms over the slightest little damage like a nick or a rub on their furniture and insist the world grinds to a halt until it's repaired. People can be so hedonistic. It drives me batty sometimes."

"Yeah. You typically don't find that attitude among the general population in Zambia, although they do have their wealthy class which is just as realistic as we are. So which moving company do you work at?"

"That one," I saw, gesturing out the window, just ahead.

There's my stop.

Owwwww

From the instant I see his face as he hauls himself aboard the bus during the evening rush home, I know he's my subject for today's post.

A distinctly large man, he is dressed like an office professional - tan dress pants, shirt, tie, and suspenders to give him the help a belt would not be able to provide. Everything matches perfectly; even the auburn colour of his neatly cut hair seems as if it had been coordinated to blend in with the outfit.

But he's in significant pain as he heads to the first available two seats he can see, opposite the rear doors. Wincing with every step, his face is drawn back as he breathes with short, shallow bursts. He collapses into the seats (both of them) but still retains his tension. His shoulders are hunched, and his hand lightly grips the support bar beside him.

It seems like more than just physical pain. He is bearing the weight of his workday and the stresses of a job that is wringing the life out of him. I remember what that's like, and feel a surge of sympathy for him.

He keeps his gaze down. Whatever his pain is, it includes a headache - he lifts his free hand and massages his temples, eyes closed ever so loosely as he tries to push away the throbbing.

As the bus rumbles along, he seems to be shunting the full force of his will into its continued motion. The delay of each stop to pick up or drop off passengers taunts him. Once he gets home, I suspect that he'll down a bunch of ibuprofen and recline on his sofa with a sigh of relief. The comfort of home will offer more healing balm than the medicine.

Until that moment though, every ticking second is raging agony.

There's my stop. Sorry, buddy.

The Ledger

I've seen him on the bus several times: an older gentleman, thin but not frail, of Indian (as in India) descent. Balding, he usually wears dress pants, a shirt and tie, a sweater vest, and a leather jacket.

On his lap he holds a notebook of sorts, or what appears to be something like a ledger. It has about 12 columns and perhaps 60 rows, per page. In each tiny cell, he is writing something small and illegible, over and over, until he fills up the page, then moves on to the next page.

I spot him right away as I board the bus today, and my curiosity gets the better of me. I sit directly behind him, about halfway down the bus. After a few minutes, I tap him on the shoulder and inquire if he'd mind if I ask him what he's writing.

With something like delight and relief that somebody has taken an interest in him, he puts the pen down and turns around to explain. "I am writing the name of my god. It is an act of worship."

I inquire further. "You're from India?" He confirms this. "Hinduism has several gods, does it not?"

"Oh, yes. I am writing the name of Rama, the chief of our gods." He shows me the cover of the ledger. "This type of faith is a very small minority in India. Perhaps only one in a thousand Indians believe and worship as I do. But still enough to sustain demand for publishing this book."

"The writing of the same name, over and over, must facilitate meditation," I offer.

He smiles. "Well, it is sometimes difficult to concentrate as I write," he concedes. "The pressures of my day, my mind wanders, it is hard to focus on my worship."

"I know what you mean," I reply. "As a Catholic, I pray the rosary. The prayer beads are repetitious, and we are to focus on specific mysteries from the life of Christ as we pray. But my mind does wander and I easily lose my focus too."

"Yes, yes," he agrees, and is silent.

"That is very interesting. I'll let you get back to it." He nods his thanks and resumes his writing-worship.

A noisy Indian (as in aboriginal) family is at the front of the bus; father, mother, four young kids, and an obvious baby in the belly. The eldest child is being a typical seven year old - bouncing around, unnecessarily fussing with the baby in the stroller, but not doing anything too bizarre. At least, not bizarre in my view - my own family is eerily identical in makeup to this one.

Suddenly the mother reveals just how loudly she can yell. "YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME ON THE BUS!" she bellows at the child. "SIT DOWN!" Sulkily, the child sits, pouting.

I think to myself, "No lady, if anybody embarrassed you just then, it was you."

The Indian (as in India) man turns around to me to make a similar wisecrack. Our discussion tacks into the realms of child rearing, discipline, and the joys of parenting. His sole daughter is 24; he has no grandchildren. But I think he'd be a pretty fun grandpa, should the day ever arrive.

There's my stop.

Almost Missed It

He's in his early-20s, trim but with a bit of acne still left over from his teenage years.

He is seated alone, although the bus is filling up quickly. I've previously referenced how I am usually the last person to earn a seat-mate on the bus. Apparently this applies to any young white male.

A blue MEC bag rests on his lap, and he has pulled out a copy of Shakespeare's King Lear and is reading intently. As much as he's young, his wardrobe is hip without being contrived, and he sports an engineer's ring on his left hand. Why he "bethought to take the basest and most poorest shape that ever penury, in contempt of man, brought near to beast" by riding the bus is beyond me. Perhaps, like me, he merely enjoys the ambiance, or the lack of commuter stress, or the fuel savings... or the chance to catch up on his reading.

His cell phone rings. Seeming slightly annoyed, he leans over and fishes it out of his pocket to answer it. Sticking a finger in the book to hold his place, he raises the book to his opposite ear to block out some of the noise on the bus so he can hear his caller.

The call ends and he puts the phone away and resumes reading. He is so focused, so devoted to the script... but it is Shakespeare, after all. If you don't stay completely zoned in, you'll soon be without a clue as to what is happening to the dear, sad protagonist. The bus rumbles merrily along as he devours the rich text.

The bus stops to pick up new passengers. As they board the bus and the front door closes, he looks up and around, then slaps the book shut with a start and bolts for the back door.

There's his stop.

He almost missed it.
.

Shiny Red Button

The mom boards the bus with his little boy in an umbrella stroller. The occupants of the foldable seat at the front of the bus vacate it and lift it up so there's room for her and the stroller to stand out of the way of the rest of the passengers.

She's young - late 20s - and her shirt forgot to button itself up far enough this morning. Her long blonde hair is drawn up into a tight, practical ponytail. The kid is cute, a rambunctious little bundle. As she positions the stroller against the bus wall, he notices the shiny red button which seated passengers can press to signal the bus to stop. He reaches out to push the button, and she nudges the stroller back so he can't reach it. But he leans forward more, fingers just grazing the button. Another nudge, and another stretch - eventually she gives up and positions her leg in between him and the button. Checkmate.

A cell phone chimes. It's hers. She reaches into her back left pocket and pulls it up, examines the call display, and flips it open - a text message. She reads it, smiles, jabs a quick reply and slides the phone back into her pocket.

The phone chimes again. She pulls it out, reads, replies, and puts it back in her pocket again.

A third time, it chimes again. Rolling her eyes, she again reaches it out of her back pocket, reads and replies. This time she simply closes the phone and keeps it in her hand. Her trick works like a charm and the phone doesn't ring again.

Checkmate.

There's her stop.

Diet

He's on the slim side of obese. I'd bet he's one of those guys who plays computer games for the entire part of the day that isn't work or sleep. Dressed in very casual business casual, he's likely headed for home, where he has elaborate plans to take his avatar warlock into the Cavern of Perpetual Doom and retrieve the Stone of Wrath, which he will then mount on the Staff of Woe, so that he can summon enough undead warriors and take on Grisnar, the ancient dragon of the Isle of Myopia. Did I mention he's wearing glasses?

On his oversized head he has squeezed a pair of massive headphones that despite their size still don't quite reach across the top of his head to cover his ears properly.

He opens his bag and pulls out a whole-wheat tortilla shell, folded tightly over itself - it is empty. But at least it's folded. He takes cavernous bites and finishes it quickly. Then he pulls a small red apple out of his bag and takes a total of four mouthfuls before he puts the core back into the bag, and pulls out another apple. Four bites later, he's done that one too and pulls out yet another apple and consumes it also, like an industrial eating machine. After that, a pear. And finally he finishes it off with a bottled water.

It seems that somebody has placed Tiny on a diet. I find myself wondering how long he's been on it, and how it has worked for him.

There's his stop.

Bap be de Bap Bap

He's tapping the base of his seat, next to me at the extreme back of the bus.

A typical nine-to-fiver, he's dressed in business casual with a bright blue fall coat: mid-forties, with hair at once thinning and too long. He is a combover waiting to happen.

I've no idea from where he got the beat in his head, but he's sharing it with the rest of the bus, or at least those of us near the back, in sporadic, intermittent bursts.

And it's catchy - literally. A young Asian man seated opposite starts tapping his fingers on the bag he's holding in his lap. An old lady boards the bus, and as the bus accelerates with her still standing, she has to compensate her footwork to keep from falling. Her altered steps match the rhythm of the tapping perfectly, making it look like she's dancing (for a 2 second burst).

It almost feels like one of those Coke commercials, or that scene from Enchanted...

[WATCH IT!]

...where one person starts with a catchy beat or tune, and the next thing you know you're in a Broadway musical where everybody from all the walks of life you encounter knows his or her part perfectly in the song you're making up as you go along.

But...

There's my stop.
.

Armor Piercing Smile

It's early morning, the first day after the last long weekend of summer. The air is muggy and chilled, and winter has sent an advance scout of wind to confirm that summer is truly over, before it rushes in with all its snowy violence.

An older man boards the bus. His white hair is thinning, his bushy eyebrows and moustache are definitely not thinning, and he wears a scowl as wide as the bus as he skulks into a rear seat.

Just seeing him is enough to make me 7% more grumpy myself. He looks genuinely cheesed off at the world and life in general. He's probably close to or past retirement age, and the logo on his jacket indicates he works for a company which likely has a damn good pension plan. But for some reason he has to keep working, and he's not happy about it.

Then she boards the bus.

Although she's probably 10 years older than me, she is still quite attractive - slim, with long dark hair, high heels, leather jacket: as the expression goes, she is a knockout.

She makes a beeline for the back of the bus and as she passes the old man she tosses him a bright, girlish smile. He sees it.

And suddenly he's a new man: gone is the grump, completely. He has caught her infectious smile, and is even blushing a little bit, like a fifteen year old chess club president who just caught the eye of the star cheerleader and doesn't quite know how to process the sensations.

Even as she continues on past him, several minutes later the afterglow of her smile is still visible on his visage.

There's my stop.