I get around

As we all know, I don’t write much more than I do write. Generally speaking this is due to lack of will or discipline or a simple, nearly constant failure to triumph over inertia. In recent months, a period when I have yearned to write, I have not been able to. Physically, that is. Ah, the irony. You don’t miss your water, et cetera.

That’s a long story. Well, it isn’t. It is actually a story that could be recounted in one terse sentence, but all my stories are long stories and I’ll tell you that one another day.

Having been welcomed back to the ranks of the typing-capable just over three weeks ago, it’s hard to know where to start. A lot of what I was moved to say / thwarted from saying had a tone that might be best classified as “despairing,” so the fact that the once-pressing details have already vanished from memory is probably no great loss for you. I personally would have liked to have the record as a low point against which to measure all my future bad days, rendering (dear god, I certainly hope so) most of them not all that bad after all. Heigh ho.

All that darkness has no place on a twinkling Sunday at the bright beginning of a new year, a new decade, and a new era of arm function, anyway. Let’s talk about the bus instead.

I have complained about MUNI for years—the slowness, the unpredictable schedule, the surly drivers, the crowds, the mentally-ill bubbling with unpredictable violence encamped in the back seats. It was all true and I don’t take it back.

But.

I do believe in the bus in the same way I believe in libraries. To ride the bus is to participate in civic life, to see who shares your city who you might not otherwise encounter. What’s more, knowledge of public transportation networks is, to me, a way of earning your cred as a local.

I have taken the bus more in the past five months than I have taken it in the past five years and I am full of previously unimagined affection and gratitude for this bonus prize of urban life. I am aware I am getting the bus at its very best. I live at the end of the line and always get a seat outbound and, inbound, if there isn’t one, someone with two functional arms gives me theirs. I have not (until tomorrow. gulp) had to take the bus at rush hour, so the passenger load is manageable. There are almost never crazy people on my regular lines.

I sit most often in the very first seat in the old and injured section of the bus. It is more community-minded than the headphones-on-girded-for-the-worst section in the back where, if I were my usual self, I too would be grumpily stuffed or clinging to a pole. In my section, people ask me what happened to me. In my section, people tell stories. In my section, we’re all struggling a bit one way or another. We are rooting for each other.

Returning to work full-time will change my relationship with these rides, fraying my patience and increasing my anxiety about being jostled. Plus, soon I expect I will be able to drive and my membership in this rolling community center will likely lapse. So right now, when my gratitude to all those kind strangers is still in full bloom, I wish them a full-hearted Happy New Year. May we all peacefully reach our destinations.

• The driver who likes me and asks me to stay on the bus during his ten-minute break instead of transferring to the sooner-departing one ahead so we could keep talking. He had pleurisy last year. And also went to Greece for a wedding.

• The wheelchair-bound vet who fought in Korea and approves of the fact that my father was born here.

• The woman who, having heard my sad accident story said, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I teach Middle School.”

• The lady who had had her shoulder replaced and then, as result of some dental work, gotten blood poisoning so had to have the shoulder replaced AGAIN. She is very proud of her daughter who recently became a nurse.

• The lady who is only slightly more baffled by her cell phone than I am by mine. Her son insisted that she get one, but she maintains that she’s just too old to be learning all that.

• The French couple who were surprised when I explained to them in French how to get to the Haight and then guessed that they were going to see “La petite maison bleue” made famous in a song. They told me the word for “screw” when I trailed off and said, “like a nail that you turn?”

• The driver who usually doesn’t talk who chatted with me one unreal weekday morning of Christmas week as we drove through a deserted city in landscape-erasing fog. “OK. It’s just us,” I said. “Where should we go?” He smiled vaguely but then did a cartoon double take and craned to look in his rearview mirror. “Wait. Are you the ONLY person on this bus right now?” And I was.

• The driver who always patiently gives directions to strung-out dudes who can’t really track them. When his friend got on one day and asked how he was, he replied “I’m fair for a square” and then they both laughed. He checks on my progress and frets that I don’t have a boyfriend. He was once a student at the same elementary school where my mother taught. In fourth grade, he was the kickball champion.

• The driver’s friend who talked about how his grandchildren just think he’s some old man, but how if they’ve even thought about doing it, he’s done it ten times. And then the driver told a story of going home early one night and finding some young guy coming down his front stairs and read him the riot act. When he asked his daughter weeks later if that guy was coming back around, she said, “Daddy, you know he’s NEVER coming back here.” He shakes his head and says to his friend, “When I did that, I had the decency to go out the window.”
  Another day, the friend is talking to another man and he says he wishes Santa would bring him a ticket to Sacramento and to Arizona so he could give his great grandchildren a squeeze.

• The four-year-old boy who adopted me immediately and nestled into my coat to take a little snooze and then popped up and said “Play with me! Play with me!” His father and I play Rock Paper Scissors with him from O’Farrell to Market, his tiny paper palm wrapping around my rock fist in gentle triumph.

• The lady coming from chemo therapy as I come from physical therapy who worries about the spill on the bus floor and helps clean it up with another lady who drags paper towel over it with the end of her cane. She mentions that something is “down the peninsula” and I say, “I can tell you’ve been here a long time because you say ‘down the peninsula’.” She laughs, delighted, and tells me she was born in San Francisco. I tell her so was my father and that I think there is a San Francisco accent of that era because when she speaks, I am suddenly in the presence of my long-deceased great aunt Gen.

• The eight-year-old girl and her mother who I see on my way to Hayes Valley and then, to my disproportionate delight, again, hours later on my way home. Weeks later, a girl is figuring out the change for a purchase of pears at the farmers’ market and I say to the mother “I wish I had a market helper. You’re lucky.” The girl turns to look at me and says quietly, “We have seen you three times.” I think she means around the market and only after a moment do I realize she is the bus girl. I am terribly flattered that she remembers me, as though she were a celebrity whose hand I had once shaken at a publicity event.

• The driver who cranes her neck to look at the bus interior in her mirror after every pick-up to be sure that anyone infirm is seated before she pulls away from the curb.

• The elegant lady with the delicious citrus perfume who tells me in English heavily accented by some Eastern European homeland that my hands are beautiful. She tells me her daughter once had a similar injury with a long and painful recovery. She tells me she had washed her daughter’s hair. “I want speak good English, “ she says, blushing. “I shame.” I assure her her English is good and she points to her head to indicate her white hair or possibly her aging brain and says she’s too old to learn it properly. She has two more transfers to get to her brother’s house. She is intrepid.

• The driver from New Mexico who can’t believe he lives in San Francisco. He surveys me in the mirror and tells me I look like Princess Diana. He said that one time the clerk at a glasses shop told him he looked like Andy Garcia and so he bought extra frames.

• The three young women from Texas in inadequate outerwear (“I have a coat at the hotel,” one tells me, “but it was so warm when we left this morning.” Amen, sister. This is San Francisco every day of my life.) who ask me what to see and so I make them get off the bus with me and walk with them to Chrissy Field where the moment the Golden Gate Bridge suddenly leaps into view feels cinematic to me every time.

• The 25-year-old at the outbound stop who confesses she had just accidentally boarded the inbound bus AGAIN and was now correcting. She had only just moved to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start and for new friends who are neither drug addicts nor liars. When she got back from Trader Joe’s, she thought she might go down and put her toes in the bay and maybe see some dogs. Which is as hopeful a New Year beginning as any.