Yes, usually, I bike to the Diner.
Once in a while, I walk. (It is only three miles.) But on a lazy Sunday like yesterday, the bus was the way to go.
Outbound, just before 8:00 AM, I was the only rider. On the way back, there are twelve of us, the driver and eleven passengers, seven of whom got on with me.
As I had never before waited at that stop with so many as two other people, this influx is hard to explain.
I can say, however, that I may as well be an Olympic athlete compared to any of the other seven. With a gun to my head I could maybe jog the three miles home while clearly no one else could walk it. Not the two overweight tattooed girls (in their late 20’s I guess) who sat on the bus stop bench and smoked and flicked their cigarettes into the street when the bus arrived, not the two old men who looked semi-homeless and needed that bench (and the cigarettes too) as much as the girls, not the two pot-bellied guys of post-stroke movement I see often at the diner itself, and certainly not the dude to whom one of the diner regulars says: “your drunk” because the guy is. Though perhaps my stiffest athletic competition if sober, right now his hands are occupied holding a bad collection of loose clothing, empty cups, and a single cigarette, stuff he drops in front of himself every few steps or whenever his legs tell his brain he can’t move forward because his pants are around his knees and maybe he should pull them up.
This is all at 9:30 on Sunday morning, here, in America.
Though I don’t claim to be able to sprint without having a heart attack, I am the only person who does not actively labor in one fashion or another to get onto the bus.
The three riders we join are a guy in the back who looks to be on his way to a shelter and, upfront, a couple—much thinner than anyone else, but obviously sick—with the woman the main player in the kind of unhinged and one-sided conversations people have if they are addicted to meth or whatever it is I confuse with meth. “Fuck or “fucking” is every other word and because she half-shouts everything I can hear all she says and that she annunciates her S’s as Z’z. As in, “Who the fuckz carez about that?” And “Can you fucking believez it?”
Not me, and no I can not.
This is not the bus of the damned, exactly, but not for first time since I returned to America from the Netherlands I am reminded of the difference between a system (or culture or lifestyle or whatever) that makes a sizeable percentage of its population sick and broken and helpless and one that does not.
As we ride, I continue the book I began in the morning and read during breakfast too, Donald Hall’s book of poetry Without. This is about the writer Jane Kenyon, his wife, and her losing battle with Leukemia.
He hovered beside Jane’s bed,
Solicitous, “What can I do?”
It must have been unbearable
while she suffers her private hurts
to see his worried face
Looming above her, always anxious to do
something when there was exactly nothing to do
As personified by Donald Trump, the face looming over us now revels in the public hurt of others. Everything and anything can be done if you are the likes of Stephen Miller or live with a proud boy ethos. And while I am more worried for my fellow passengers than put-off by them, I ride along wrestling with that ongoing American struggle. In any event, if this sad bus still runs in the future it will not lack for riders who find it hard to thrive in this less than perfect union.
And now, just before we get to our last stop, the drunk guy stands such that the “fuckity-fuck” woman can rescue me from my liberal guilt and dystopian drift: At him and for the whole bus to hear she offers a yet louder shout Kamala herself might have cribbed: "Pull your pantz, up dude. There’z femalez prezent."