Today I took, I think, the most beautiful bus ride I've been on since moving to Seattle. It was the same southbound route that I've taken a hundred times--down to the Central District on the 48 bus from the U District--and it wasn't particularly nice out this morning. The air had that sort of gray chill that probably comes to mind when people who haven't been here think about what Seattle must be like. It's a bright, sunny afternoon as I write this, but this morning was utterly unremarkable on that score.
So the bus ride wasn't beautiful for its newness, nor for the quality of day I could see out the window. The beauty lay in the people onboard with me, though they too seemed unremarkable at first glance.
The first of these was a woman sitting in the front seats, those that are perpendicular to the rest of the seats on the bus. She had boarded before me, so she was already seated when I hopped on. I breezed past her without a second thought--that is, until she stood up to get off the bus. It was at this point that I noticed that both of her hands were formed not of four fingers and a thumb, but each had been naturally fused into a sort of hook shape (I apologize for not knowing a more correct and dignified way of describing this).
She grasped the bus pole, smiled at and thanked the driver, and was off. I saw her standing outside the bus. She pulled a phone from her purse, opened it, and began to laugh. What was initially so captivating to me was that she seemed so genuinely happy, so carefree, despite her (I thought) obvious disability.
That thought lasted about five seconds before it was replaced by one of utter self-disgust. What does that say about me? That I was surprised that someone with a handicap could be so obviously happy? I think we expend a lot of energy and effort pitying people who we perceive to be less fortunate than us, particularly the disabled. But the more I think about it, the more unhealthy and condescending that viewpoint seems to me. I should know better from experience, too--would I really want the rest of the world to spend their time pitying my cousin, who has lived her whole life with several severe developmental disabilities? Wouldn't I expect them to see her simply as a human being, as I do?
So the first five minutes of my bus ride were beautiful because they forced me to challenge the way I see the world and the assumptions I hold about people.
At the stop where the smiling woman got off, a mother and her two towheaded sons got on. The mother occupied the exact same seat as the previous woman. One son was at most seven or eight years old, the other couldn't have been older than two. As two-year-olds are wont to be, he was incredibly vocal, albeit incoherent. I watched them all interact for a good long while--as a former elementary school teacher, I'm a sucker for watching kids do funny stuff; as someone that only has brothers, I'm always keen to observe the way other brothers deal with each other.
I wasn't disappointed. The mother would hold the younger brother up and let him explore the area around him--the window, the seats, the standing bar. All the while, his older brother would explain everything to him in a manner that you could just tell was bursting with pride. Older brothers are notorious for wanting to show how much they know, and this one was no different, but you could also tell he was just happy to be able to help his little brother understand the world.
While this was going on it struck me that there was a good chance that none of them--or at least, neither of the kids--would ever remember this very poignant moment in their young lives. It got me thinking about memory, and what a strange shape it takes. I now have a memory of a family I will likely never see again, one that they themselves might never share. Who stops to think about, and preserve, any one in particular of a lifetime of commutes on public transport? So I'm now in the odd position of maybe being the sole possessor of this memory, which doesn't belong to me at all.
I personally have very vague recollections of anything that happened before age eight or nine. I remember feelings, colors, faces, more than I remember actual conversations or events. And why would I have anything more than that? Kids are pretty much by definition incapable of nostalgia, so it's not a surprise that they don't take the time and effort to cement memories within themselves that will withstand in full the test of time. Why would they? When people gripe that youth is wasted on the young, one of the things I think they're really saying is that young people don't do justice to their own important moments. They don't intentionally create memories. They just live.
So my bus ride was also beautiful for the pure, unbridled interactions I got to witness between two brothers who will never know what kind of effect they had on me.
The last thing that made my bus ride beautiful had a timeline that in places overlapped that of the brothers. At one of our stops, an Ethiopian woman got on the bus using a single crutch. She didn't look a day above forty. She sat in another perpendicular seat, across the aisle from the blonde family. In the seat across from mine was an Ethiopian man of similar age. (By the way, I know they were Ethiopian because of how they talked--I don't know a word of Amharic, but I have a ton of Ethiopian students in my classes and caseload, so I hear it spoken pretty much daily.)
They rode in silence for a good long while, though they had exchanged a polite nod when she sat down. Two or three minutes before she got off, she leaned over to her left and asked the man a question. He snapped upright and answered her, and they fell into a friendly conversation. It was like watching ice melt, the way their faces slowly softened into bigger and bigger smiles as the conversation went on. Like I said, I didn't understand a word, but I felt like I didn't have to. The emotion present was pure, unaffected. About the only thing I did catch was the woman's name, Yodit. Because the world is funny and there is no such thing as coincidence, I learned that name a week ago in the closing chapters of a phenomenal book (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu). On those pages, Stephanos, the narrator and himself an Ethiopian immigrant to the U.S., muses that the name of his American love interest (Judith) is just an anglicized version of the "original" (Yodit).
The woman's stop came, and she said her goodbye with a smile. I watched the man as she exited, and his face was that of someone who is frantically deciding between two equally terrifying prospects. At the last second he dashed off the bus, too. I was captivated watching this--the woman heard him coming, and turned back with a smile. They shook hands, and he appeared to be talking a mile a minute. The way we so often do when we're putting ourselves out there emotionally, and the nerves are taking hold. The bus pulled away, and the last I saw of them was their hands, still clasped.
So on a gray unremarkable morning, with a moderate hangover and the furthest thing from a sunny outlook, I experienced the most beautiful bus ride of my short Seattle career.
