In the front of the bus...

I have to write this down while it’s still fresh in my mind. This morning I took my normal bus to school in West Los Angeles and I sat in the front of the bus with an extraordinary set of individuals.

After I got on the bus, at the next stop an older gentleman (maybe 75/80) got on. 

“How much for seniors?” he asks. 

He was immediately very chatty, and he goes up and asks the bus driver about where to get off to get for the Skirball Center, a museum, café, and center for Jewish culture in LA. The driver tried to be helpful, but she had other things going on, so he sat down and then tried to confirm “Ok, so it’s the 2nd stop!?” I told him, “no, it will be our first stop; it will drop you off right there.” So then he asks me if I have ever been there and I told him I have, but a long time ago, and I really liked it. I was trying to not be so chatty, since I had a lot of reading to do, but he was so excited, telling me about the Noah’s Ark exhibit and how he has already been twice but he wants to go again and it’s free on Thursdays. I always thought the exhibit was for kids, but I thought it was great that he loved it so much. He convinced me to go see it (and I did, after school, for free, and it was pretty damn cool, but totally for kids and not adults.) He also started telling me about how excited he was that he could take the 761 to the Skirball AND the Getty, which he didn’t know when he went the first time with his Senior Center. I told him he could even take the 761 all the way to UCLA to check out the Hammer, the Fowler, and the Botanical Gardens. He was so into it and said he already had gone to the Fowler.

Near us was a man, maybe in his mid-50’s, who was chiming in and also wanted to know about the botanical garden. The older man got off the bus and gave us a warm goodbye. This man (in his 50’s), Terence, was writing on paper with a nice pen. He had lovely handwriting. We ended up chatting and he told me that he suffered a severe concussion from a bike accident that made his eyes pop out and he was in a rehab program that was paying for him to take writing classes at UCLA. Baller! He had a great attitude and enjoyed telling me his story. I ended up having to tell him that I had to finish reading an article, but it was really nice talking with him. While I was still on the bus, near him, there was another man in the front area who I have seen many times on my bus. He is [or looks] Indian, skinny, dresses very sharply, wears glasses, and is always reading an old copy of a classic. He tells Terence, “you have beautiful penmanship”. Then they begin to chat, and it comes out that the Indian man used to be a computer scientist, and then he decided to do a PhD in history, and is now a history professor at UCLA. When he got off the bus, I packed up my things because I was getting off next. I told Terence “you get to meet all sorts of neat people on the bus, right?!” and he responded “this is not common on the bus, and what’s special is the opportunity. Riding the bus gives you the opportunity to have experiences like this.” He had an enormous smile on his face. It was so sweet. I bid him farewell and held that bus ride in my heart for the rest of the day.