the wheels on the bus…

Do you ever make up stories of what people the you see on the public buses on a regular basis do when they get off the bus?

I find myself doing that from time to time. The older lady with the water bottle who walks two blocks away to a stop when there’s one right across the street (I don’t think she likes people), who gets off at the St. Mark’s Catholic Church stop and goes to the senior center across the Ave and down the road to do… something with old people. Or else sits in St. Mark’s all day praying. They refugee women with babies strapped to their backs with swaths of cloth who go to some cultural center after they drop their kids off at school. The weird creepy guy who sometimes gets on with an armload of white dress pants and shirts that honestly look like they’ve seen better days. The neo-Nazi with the devil horns tattooed on his head (he even displays them in the winter, takes his winter hat off and everything. I haven’t been able to think of a reason as to why he does that, beyond some driving need to show them off) and probably works at Yankee Tattoo, or for some reason I can picture him in the Christian Science Reading Room next door. Or both.

I don’t know why I do this. I guess you wonder what these people do with their lives when you’re not all sharing the same air on a sometimes crowded bus, especially when you see them more often than you do the members of your immediate family. Not to mention sitting on two buses twice a day gets immensely boring. It makes me wonder what people think of me when I’m sitting there on the bus, going about my student business. I wonder if they think I’m a stoner, a punk, a flatlander, a hippy. Of course I’m none of those things. It makes you think about how much a first impression can really impact how you’re looked at by people, even when you’ve never once said a word to each other.