Riding the Bus

I like riding the bus to work for a lot of reasons. I can sit and stare off into space and ignore everything. I can watch people. I can listen. Sometime I should take a microphone with me on the bus. The sounds are the best part of the ride.

Today, there were two men sitting behind me speaking beautiful Spanish. If I had to guess I would say one was from Spain and the other from Latin America. The one that I imagine is from Spain looks like a professional soccer player to me. He is tall, with very dark hair and eyes, and he has a 5 o'clock shadow at 8:00am. He appears to be very fit. Also he often wears soccer jerseys, which helps the image. The other fellow is shorter with broad shoulders and nose, and has a similar shadow to his face. He has the legs of a soccer player, but not the jersey. He seems to pronounce his "s" sound differently too. Still in a clear elegant fashion, but not with the "th" hint that speakers from Spain and southern France have. As they spoke it seemed as if they were singing a secret to one another. A whispered melody, kept secret by my ignorance of their vocabulary.

Their's was not the only song I heard today. In back of the bus a black man was recounting some exciting news to a friend. I couldn't hear his content but I recognized the tune. It was spiritual. Had the words been foreign I would have thought he was singing. His cadence started low and landed with emphasis on the punctuation of his sentence. Each time he arrived at the same tone. I was staring off out the window when I first heard it and I honestly thought someone was singing. Then I realized what it was and I was more delighted than if it had been a song.

There are other sounds too. Like the relieved report of the rear door when it opens for someone getting off the bus after a long day at an awful job. There is a humble groan to the hydraulics when they kneel to accommodate a man in a wheelchair or to ease old knees out of the coach. I like the bus for all these sounds and for a dozen more.