The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round-Making Good Connections

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

Making good connections

I spend a lot of time on public transit. It suits me. I’ve owned cars, but I don’t want one now. Time on the bus and subway allows me time and space to focus . I usually do  a little bookkeeping , (probably to the horror of my accountant friends). Often I read. Occasionally I listen to a pod-cast (although I still feel self-conscious and somehow vulnerable  attached to a headset in a public place). Note to self: somewhere in a drawer at home, I have a teeny-tiny set of earplugs that I could probably plug into the laptop, thus allowing me to look cool instead of weird . It’s a fine line in the GTA. This morning , I’m using my transit time to observe fellow humans and to write.
Those of you familiar with public transit may have noticed that on most days riders (and drivers) are a nasty bunch. Even when not being downright surly and rude, many of them just plain look miserable. You gotta wonder where they’re going, or where they’ve been, to be so joyless.

This morning, on my way to spend the day with two of my adorable grandchildren, I’m feeling pretty good. I got myself together early enough to catch the bus out of Toronto and I’m making good connections between the various modes of transit. On the RT car  ( a very cool, very fast subway-like train that runs above ground) I overheard a man a couple of seats down speak to the woman beside him. I don’t know what he said but  picked up quickly on his Dutch accent. I’m a sucker for accents; I just love to listen to people whose first language is different from my own. I wished he would say something else and was just about to initiate a conversation with the sole purpose of hearing him talk.

Then I noticed an odd phenomenon. He was SMILING. FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON that I could see, he just kept grinning. I watched him stand up, nod to a couple of people and leave the train, still sporting that LOOK of HAPPINESS. I had to well…smile.

When the train pulled into my station, I was still wondering what the man had been smiling about.

I transferred to a bus for the next leg of my journey. As I lowered myself and my mobile office into the first  available seat, a young woman cautioned me”don’t sit there!” Turns out water from the roof of the bus was leaking onto that seat. I love a challenge, so I sat down and leaned forward to avoid the drip. That didn’t work for long, so I tried stuffing a kleenex around the what I thought was the source of the problem. The woman who’d issued the warning smiled . The man who sat across from me offered that maybe gum would work better. He was smiling too. For the next ten minutes, we dreamed up a variety of solutions, none of which worked. As passengers boarded the bus, they joined in the challenge. And they smiled.

And as the bus pulls into my final destination, I find myself smiling FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON.