Some scribblings from the bus...

Funny, how you can find potential story characters absolutely EVERWHERE once you start looking for them.  I’m back to paying attention on the bus again, disguised as your everyday passenger absorbed in headphones and the occasional book… but inside I’m taking mental notes, plucking idiosyncrasies here, interesting facial features there, a snatch of dialogue eavesdropped from a conversation just behind my seat, a pair of astonishingly beautiful eyebrows…  And I feel like I know all these people that I’ve ridden this bus with for the past two years, though it’s really just crisscrossing, sharing the same space for a little while before we all scatter to our separate lives.

The man in the cardigan and pressed slacks, the one with the warm eyes.  He looks like the kind of person who notices things.  His name is Ernie, I just found out today.  It suits him.  Before that, I’d been thinking of him only as The Gentleman because of the way he always waits at the very back of the line for everyone else to board before getting on the bus himself.  A few times I tried hanging back, wondering if he’d possibly get on before me… but no, each time he’s nodded oh so graciously yet insistently.  Go on.  Find a seat.  I’ll wait.

The… I don’t know what to call them individually… it’s practically impossible NOT to think of them as a group… the… oh dear.  This delightful gaggle of women (some of them might be professors, almost all of them work at the university), they sit behind me in the very back every morning and are the absolute loudest people on the bus.  I can turn up my music as high as I want and still hear everything.  Sometimes it’s outrageous.  Sometimes it’s just plain old funny.  Always lots of raucous laughter.  One time they got into a spirited discussion about the evils of antibacterial soap, and (unbeknownst to them of course) I jotted the whole thing down then and there… I wish I could find those notes.  They are a blunt, sharp-humored bunch.  VERY smart. 

Then there’s Ponytail Man.  Well, he used to be Ponytail Man until one day he boarded the bus with that long blondish ponytail missing and a normal, everyday haircut in its place, but to me he is and always will be Ponytail Man.  I’ve sat behind him and next to him a couple of times, close enough to glance at the books he always carries with him in that beat-up camouflage backpack.  Lots of Japanese manga, not translated.  The cute schoolgirl and giant robot kind.  More Japanese books.  It makes me wonder if he’s learning the language or is perhaps already fluent.  He reads those a lot, and sometimes Louis L’amour paperbacks.

There’s a new boy who gets on the bus in the evenings, at the stop right after we pass the grocery store.  He’s lithe and thin, with muscular, tanned arms and a pair of the skinniest legs I’ve ever seen (pants a little too short, rolled up; boots a little too big, the leather work kind).  He looks like he grew up running through cornfields and playing baseball.  Lanky blonde hair, impossibly dark eyebrows.  The other day he pulled out a newspaper and read it the entire way into town, half-smiling, utterly absorbed, like the newsprint was telling him secrets.  He’s a cross between Peter Pan and Almonzo Wilder, with (I think) a touch more of the former.  I’ve started calling him Peter Pan in my head.

The beautiful black baby (well, not really a baby anymore, probably two or three – and not really black, more like chocolate – but “the chocolate toddler” sounds quite strange indeed) who I see occasionally in the mornings with her mom.  They get on at the stop just after the train tracks, the mother loaded down with diaper bag and stroller, baby in tow.  She (baby) is now big enough to sit in a seat of her own, chubby legs outstretched, body bent forward in an effort to take it ALL in – passengers, the view from every window, the driver.  All with that wide-eyed, solemn gaze.  When they get off just before we reach the mall, the crowd in the back of the bus gets a little quieter, waiting.  Mother and baby disembark, the baby straining to hold onto the diaper bag while still peering around to get a last look at all of us on the bus.  She has no idea she is queen of the XB.  And they get off… we’re all still waiting.  Will she?  Will she do it?  And, without fail, just as the mother hoists her onto her hip and slings the diaper bag over the other shoulder, she does, she strains back toward the departing bus and waves regally with one tiny hand.