1. The Scene

I’ve just taken over my bus in Pioneer Square from the previous operator and am preparing it to my liking. Setting the mirrors, taping up my bright green smiley face to the shield– If they can’t see my real smile, they’ll at least see this one!

I can hear the two guys talking outside on the Main Street bridge. One is well-spoken and articulate. They’re having a pleasant conversation as they watch the freight trains below. Highlights I can recall: the articulate fellow saying, “I try to bring positivity and joy to people’s days. I can make anyone feel better in three minutes. I’m great for three minutes. After minute 4:20, I’m gone though." To two women walking by: “have a positive day.” One didn’t respond, the other turned and quietly said, “thank you,” as her friend continued talking. Him to his friend, later: “I tend to prefer doing meth alone.” “Some people think I’m conceited, but I’m just being confident.” He was skulking in appearance, scruffy but with a movie-star face, like if Warren Oates had softer lines.

I called over to them, “have a good day, gentlemen!” and we talked briefly about bus driving, about how it’s the best job ever if you like people. He said he’d find intimidating the size of the vehicle, but the people would be fine, he’s good around people. “I can tell,” I said. I could hear them singing my praises to each other as I drove away.

2. The Drive

I’d inspected the bus interior before starting the trip. Toward the back on a seat was a pizza box with half a pepperoni pizza, and a huge maroon sleeping bag right next to it stuffed kind of beneath, but not under, a seat. It was very visible. It was so large I initially mistook it for a person. I opted to leave both as found. I hoped the bag’s owner would return to recover it. It was a good sleeping bag. Incredibly, a full trip passed by in which no one touched either the bag or the pizza! On the return trip, a tall ruddy fellow intrepidly ate a slice and promptly fell asleep.

Subsequent trips happened with no pizza bravery (nor perhaps pizza desire), despite, well, everything you might imagine being in place that would compel one to eat pizza on a bus: hunger, boredom, free food, ease of access… go figure.

More bizarre to me was the fact that no one touched the sleeping bag! I asked a sleeping form at a bus stop in Aurora Village if he was awake, with a thought to giving him the sleeping bag plus pizza. He didn’t respond. What a lottery he passed up! I didn’t push it with him nor with other potential sleeping bag winners, because I wanted to leave open the possibility of the bag’s original (or last) owner returning for it. I left the pizza onboard too, as I’d prefer happy pizza-satisfied people on my bus rather than elsewhere.

Six hours later, toward the end of my piece, just before my last trip, I went back to the bag and inspected it. There was still a slice of pizza left. “You guys need to get better at eating pizza,” I said to the empty interior, possibly aloud. The bag was in great shape, meaning: it had no needles in it. I took it with me and stepped out at 4th and Main, walking toward a gaggle of men on the Amtrak railway overpass.

3. The Vigor

“Gentlemen,” I called out confidently, “how’s it going. Do any of you guys know someone who wants a sleeping bag? This is a good one. It’s been on my bus six hours and nobody claimed it…”
The fellow from earlier, the friendlier Warren Oates, came froward. I hadn’t noticed he was still here. “Hey, you’re the guy from earlier!” We greeted each other like friends.
“Wow, this is a good one,” he observed. He asked my name. We shook hands. I haven’t shaken a man’s hand in two years. His handshake was like mine are: one firm shake, nothing more or less. His name was Magic.
“That’s an awesome name,” I said. “Way cooler than mine.”
He rebounded with a compliment I forget.
“I make do! Workin’ with what I got,” I laughed, looking at another fellow nearby, who was chuckling. I greeted him. He was Lavelle. “This is Lavelle,” Magic said.
“Lavelle?! Man, everyone’s got cooler names than me!”

Others sauntered over, but it was mainly the three of us doing the talking. We lit up the rain-speckled night. We forgot about the wind on the bridge. We forgot people have differences. We talked about Hollywood, where Magic and I have both lived. Lavelle was holding an ab roller. He’d dropped it on the downhill and gracefully picked it up again, nimbly circling to catch it on the downside. “Okay Lavelle, I gotta ask you what that thing with the wheel is. I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s an ab roller,” he explained. That somehow led to Lavelle revealing plastic black garbage bags under his sweater.
“Stayin’ warm? Stayin’ waterproof?” I asked.
“Naw, I’m sweating it off. I’m losing weight.”
Magic said, “how much d’you weigh?”
Lavelle: “Three.”
“Three hundred pounds? What?”
I said, “I don’t believe that! What?”
“Three,” Lavelle nodded, sagely.
“Well, you wear it well. I never woulda guessed.”
“I sat in jail for six months, put on fifty pounds, came out here to this shelter, put on fifty more pounds…”

We were the club of making each other feel better. They’d complimented my name when I’d praised their cool names. I said, “well, this is the time of everyone puttin’ on weight, it bein’ Covid and all. Whether they’re sittin' at home or sittin' in the office or sittin' somewhere else, they’re all puttin' on the pounds."
We talked about bus driver weight gain, about bodybuilders who move stiffly because they forget to stretch, the need to be watchful of such things, complimenting him on his ab-rolling, his sweating, his commitment. I couldn’t let it go. I said, “hang on. Lavelle. I weigh one forty-eight. There’s no way you weigh two of me.”
“Okay, I did some roundin',” he smiled.
“I knew it! I knew it!”

4. The Glow

What else did we talk about? There were so many asides, quips, and laughs, the laughs you laugh with your whole body because the sidewalk is big enough and the sky is high above you. Because Lavelle is on his way, and because Magic is magic. They’re in a job placement program that sounds killer. I was reminded of a recent conversation with Richard, a formerly homeless acquaintance on my E Line. I’d congratulated him on finding a home and a job because “well, that’s so hard to do!"

Richard had replied, agreeably, “it’s actually not. All you have to do is pay attention.* They give you everything you could possibly need in this city. I mean everything…."

Magic and Lavelle were two more such enterprising types. These two had been mistreated by the world and they had the nerve not to take it personally. By luck or will they’d landed in a program that would help them with job placement, mental health, counseling, that would provide food and board even after they got their job for another year, “so even if you’re flippin’ burgers you’re still gonna save some serious coin!"

“I gotta go drive,” I eventually told them. I walked away faring each man well by name, nodding, gesturing thank you, gesturing love. There were so many things I liked about the glowing space we’d together made. We men did not, as men all too often do, waste air performing assertions of dominance. We did not boast or talk about money. We spoke not in answers but questions, asking and learning about life, about each other, talking as adults at their best do. Polite. Open. We mirrored our best selves and rose higher and higher into the sky. I was very nearly giddy as I got in my driver’s seat and started up the coach. They watched me make the turn onto northbound 4th, driving the behemoth away. Their joy poured out through me onto the people during this, my last trip of the night, and I noticed something different.

5. The Light

There has been a poison in the air of late, generally; something in addition to Covid and harder to name, but just as insidious. A fear that drives people apart and makes them forget we’re social animals, that we feel better when we connect. Antisocial behavior is hardest to find in working-class and low-income communities, but it has found even us, on the E line, which I’ve been away from long enough for the crowd to completely forget me. This is a new crowd, and they seem not to know what to do with my behavior. My goodwill has been striking them as foreign, and the best response they can muster for now is ignorance.

But not tonight. There is something in me, infused in me from the earlier street conversation. Love instills confidence. Respect instills momentum. I’m full, rich, overflowing tonight. I’m motivated by what’s within me, the glow from Magic and Lavelle that we together built on the street corner. When that’s inside you it’s so much easier to not care who’s around or what they might think of you.

"Nice work!” yelled an unpredictable man who’d been watching me, at the end of his ride. The others waved in response to my yelled thank-yous, more than they normally do. They could somehow read the genuineness in my actions, feel it, and they responded in kind. How did they know? What was the giveaway, the tell, that my confident joy was unaffected? That above all I wanted to be there, with them, right now? What beauty there was in their now-uncharacteristic responsiveness.

Can the future please involve this?

---

*If you are mentally stable, have no addictive drug-related behaviors, no criminal history and have your paperwork in order, this is true. You're on your way! Otherwise? Not so much. Free food, however, is nigh impossible to go without in Seattle– refer to the 22-page PDF below, courtesy of Real Change's invaluable Emerald City Resource Guide.

It's near midnight. Isn't always near midnight when stories happen? A figure is running over. I'm early, sitting here at Campus Parkway for an extra light cycle. No need to leave this fellow in the dust. I'm feeling generous. Why am I feeling generous?

About twenty minutes ago eggs were thrown at my bus, spew-cascading off my left side and mirrors. It took me a bit to piece together. First a flash more like a sound, a scattering sparking flare on the asphalt; then I notice my left exterior mirror, newly hazy, slimy, the only time yellow is ever offensive. The car speeding off now makes sense. I'm more confused than hurt. What did this mean? What can it mean?

Seeing this running figure now, I didn't have the energy to be spiteful. He was a tall black man wearing all black, American, hiking up the fabric of his jeans, the better to allow him to run. Urban fashion du jour– sagging pants, overheavy construction boots, unlaced basketball sneakers, loads of heavy fabric, layered jackets over hoodies… people who dress like this can't move quickly. But he put himself together as best he could, hustling briskly over. You do what you have to do.

“Man,” he breathed. “I appreciate you so much.”
“Oh for sure.”
“Seriously though, thank you.”
“Always! I know the feeling!”
“Oh man. You changed my night. I'm so grateful.” I could tell he meant it, too, out here in the late night. Not everyone about at this time is actually going anywhere. But for those with destinations, a desperation sets in as the buses become less frequent, each hour a little colder.
“Dude, for sure. Too long to wait for the next bus, you know?”
He grinned in the dark. “I KNOW!”

As we pulled away I added, “I ride the bus all the time, so I know how it feels.”
“You already know. Man there's times when I come runnin’ up on the side the bus I got my hands together like this, begging. I'm begging! And he done just drives off.”
“Ooohh! That's terrible! Why!”
“Or another time I'm tryna get the 49, it's 'bout two o’clock in the morning, right–”
"Yeah." I've driven that one. He had the storyteller’s enthusiasm, and more. Look at his eyes glinting brightly, his pearly white teeth gleaming against the dim interior. I briefly wondered if he’d had braces, like me. Straight teeth, clean skin. Good-looking guy. He continued.
“And I'm begging, bro!”
I was reminded of this moment. The gesture of an appeal to one's better angels gets to me. I said, "how could anyone say no to that?"
“Yeah! And he leaves me, but I run after him. And I make it down to the next one, and then the next one and he lets me on. But that was after I chased him all the way down.”
“Man, the stress! ‘Specially that time of night. I'm so sorry. I try to make up for those guys.”
“You so do. Man, thank you. You made my night. Now I got something to tell my wife. This was th’ highlight of the whole day. What's your name?”
“Nathan.”
“Nathan, my name's JJ.”
“Good to meet you.”
“You too.”

Some people hide their enthusiastic verve because they're worried about being made fun of. He didn't have an iota of that in his DNA. I decided to be honest about my feelings. Do you know the sensation, when you realize you’re among like company?

“Actually, dude, I'm glad you stepped in, ‘cause right before you got on there was some guys in a car that was throwin’ eggs at the bus.”
“What? Eggs?”
“Yeah, just drivin' past. There's some on the outside of the bus." I gestured to my left.

He heard me. He really heard me. He was slowing down now, a birthing seriousness. I could see him picturing the event. “Man, that's messed up.”
“I was like, where's this coming from, why would they do that? Are these high school kids or something?” At what age do we learn that being spiteful, holding grudges– is a waste of time?
“Eggs? At a bus? Maaan," he said, incredulously. "I wish't I could a been there, I woulda hopped out and–”
“It's like, come on now! And it's not like I did anything to them, cut 'em off or something, they just came outta nowhere.”
“Yeah, I see one on th’ glass there." Referring to my left side mirror.
“I can't take it personal though, cause... they don't know me.”
“Yeah. That's the world we live in though.”
“Yeah, it's a funky time right now.”
“TikTok and all that, people rather do that and go to jail. Man, why they wanna throw shit at a bus?”
“Doesn't make any sense!”

He said it suddenly, with urgency: "I wanna wash it off for you."
I looked at him. The passion in his voice went straight to my heart. I didn't know what to say.
"I’ll hop out really quick the next time you stop.”
“Aw, it's cool," I said. "Thank you though, I appreciate you.”
“Naw, man–”
“You don't have to do that.”
He said, “Bro. We gotta take care of each other.”

And with that he was out the bus at Rainier Vista, before I could say anything. I pulled the emergency brake. He grabbed a few masks from the dispenser as impromptu paper towels and scrambled over to my left side, scrubbing and wiping away. This man cared. He needed to balance out the world's hate. He wanted to show me my fragile goodness, my kind intentions, were appreciated. That they deserved more than trampling.

We gotta take care of each other.

I could have cried. He leapt back inside with alacrity, saying, “There, that's better. I hope that's better.”
“You're amazing,” I said, looking at him. “Seriously, thank you.”
“Got to look out for our bus drivers!”
“Man, JJ, thank you so much.” We were parked at a bus stop, and outside my still-open doors was a young woman waiting for another bus. I looked at her and yelled out, gesturing to my friend whom she’d just watched clean the bus, “this is the man o' the year right here! Man of the year!” She smiled. He did too.

We were on our way.

Like nothing had happened, he and I were back to talking.
“It's crazy, 'cause, I'm used to driving routes that are more... intense than this, like I drive the 7 and the E Line, but this never happened on those ones! And this' the 75, and nothing ever happens on the 75–"
“NOTHING!” he practically roared, in wild agreement. This guy knew the lay of the land.
“Totally! On those routes, people would sometimes step up to help me when something was going down, and I always appreciated that. People helping each other out.”
“Man, if this happened on those routes I bet some folks woulda stepped out the bus to take care of that car, no questions asked. Eggs? Seriously, who is these people?”

At some point you run out of air complaining, and life starts back up again. Thank goodness for that. I said, “so you just gettin' offa work?”
“Yeah, I'm at the Gyro place on the Ave.”
“I hope they give you a discount on the food.”
“Yeah, family owned, so stop in!”

So that's why he was out here. His last words are how I remember him. He said them with unabashed enthusiasm:
“Man, I wish there was more I could do for you. You changed my night. Thank you!”

Some guy running after the bus from across the street holding up his pants with one hand. Can you believe it? That's the nicest passenger of the night.

---

I reflected as I drove away. I thought about him, but I couldn't help think about the eggs and eggers as well. You've been there, I think, mistreated before in some way. Our friend above has too, I'm sure, and I imagine that's at least partly what motivated his vigor in correcting the night's error. You've suffered, and afterwards the question has nagged you also: why do certain people sometimes hurt other people?

We have to start by remembering two things. Firstly, as Rutger Bregman points out, humans only do evil when it's disguised as good. When it achieves a balance or aim they deem worthy. Secondly, people often assume other people think and behave like them. A cynic will interpret your actions cynically. A pessimist will think you're pessimistic, or else not pessimistic enough. Crucially, a distrusting and deceitful person will assume you are the same. They will not perceive their slip-up in assuming this. You may be gullible and friendly, like me; but they can still think you're manipulative and hateful, if that's their own modus through life. People don't see you. They see their experience of you, and that perception is based on the totality of their life experiences up until that moment. Which have nothing to do with you, of course. You want to ask them, are you really at all surprised by your conclusion?

The root of all anger is mistrust. And anger's search for a release can manifest in harm done to others, feeble attempts to assert power over others, the self hunting for itself in all the wrong places. These poor souls don't have a clue. They spend a lifetime not figuring out what the rest of us already know: none of that will actually help you. Stop looking outward.

In the long run, for the ease of your heart and the health of your soul, it is infinitely better to receive harm than to cause it. Nothing calcifies the soul like pretending to yourself you are good when you know, deep down, that you aren't. As the film says, better to suffer injustice than to do it.

Those boys (or girls) had no idea why they egged my bus. But I know why. It was so I could be bathed in glowing goodness and love twenty minutes later. So I could know how that feels, how real and true the best sides of humanity are.

You remember Angel of Third and Marion, from this speech of mine. I'm now christening this fellow Angel of Campus Parkway. Remember: Some Guy running around Campus Parkway at midnight.

I'm so glad I gave him a chance.

No child is born taciturn. What makes some men so? What wrongs have they suffered, what kindness of theirs thwarted, scorned, ridiculed? Fragility is what drives the urge to present a deadened exterior, and no creature is more fragile than the human male. How tantalizing it is to embody invincibility, especially in the spaces which all but demand it: armies, sports, prisons. The street. You do it long enough, and you might even begin to believe your facade. So rough, so tough. You speak no longer in sentences, but assertions. You dominate. It is at this point the last part of your soul's capacity for love drifts off, and its final slumbering thought is, "well. At least this is easier."

But is it worth losing your ability to feel? What is living if not feeling? Are not the harder thing, and the right thing, usually the same?

He was a master of the hard front, and I wasn't about to criticize him for it. You get your heart railroaded enough times and the animal urge to protect yourself makes the decision for you. Shut down time. This man's face said Closed for Business to any stranger, with one difference: he still looked people in the eye. The principal difference between street smarts and book smarts is the former demands direct engagement with one's immediate present. A ready awareness. He may have been taciturn, but he responded to me at least half the time, stalking quickly past me after putting his bicycle on the rack.

Me, giving the upward nod: "How's it goin'?"
Him, gruffly: "'Sup."

Me, calling out as he zipped past me to get his bicycle: "Thanks man."
The deep voice: "Yup."

The other half the time he'd just stare balefully. At least it read as baleful. I don't think it was. It was just his way of confronting the world: steady, strong. On his terms. His eye contact was fearless and direct. He wasn't trying to leave an impression, but for me he did; a noncommittal, gangster quiet. Was that an eyedrop tattoo? I couldn't be sure. Those with the most interesting pasts keep them hidden.

He was taller than me, slightly, also a mixed-race Asian man. Always with a dark blue hood pulled close round his head. Even if you're a quiet person, which he was, you have to communicate if you're a bike rider who uses buses. He found the least affable way to do so, yelling "Bike!!!" as he jumped out the rear door and scurried up to the front (for the love of all things holy, use the front door to exit if you're a bicyclist). 

And then one night, as there inevitably is in life, there is change. An event. Here is a furtive young white man, ratlike in movement, dressed in a grey hoodie and black pants, hiding within his too-large clothes and muttering, alternately hunched over near the front, alternately picking about at the bus's scrap-laden floor. No bus interior gets dirtier than the nighttime E Line.

I'm at a zone with the ramp out, helping two passengers and their wheelchair. The old man in the chair finally stands up, hobbling forward with three cases of Heineken in his arms, as his lithe companion pushes the heavy electric wheelchair up the ramp. Later on he, I, and a kind stranger will all join forces in pushing it off the bus. For now we're figuring things out up front and it's taking a second. All three doors are open. Taciturn Gangster is seated in the back area, just in front of the rear doors like he prefers, with his bicycle mounted up front. He'd gotten on earlier.

---

Now the furtive ratlike fellow, slinking out the middle doors and up to Taciturn Gangster's bicycle. Look at him sniffing at it. Caressing the handlebars. He looks around, looks at me looking at him, my attention divided. He starts to fiddle with the securing mount...

I'm on the mic, and loud. "Dude with the bike. Someone's trying to take your bike. Come on up and get it."

Taciturn Gangster's response is instant, almost military in its alacrity. He stands and sees and is instantly at the front outside the bus, covering the ground alongside in something smaller than seconds.

Here is a backhand smack across the face, with words to match.

In life most punches make little sound. What you hear is the rustle of clothing. But the young grey man stands as if unsmacked, impervious. He stares with no expression. Rain begins to fall.

"Why you touchin' my bike? That's not yours! Get away from there!"

Others are jumping out to watch, to support. For once everyone around Taciturn Gangster supports him. They silently advocate for him. When did he last experience that sensation? There is no danger now. No question that the bicycle will stay. But the ratlike grey man sees differently, like he's breathing air from a distant somewhere else. He doesn't realize he needs to stop. He gazes over at the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, and back again. His face is pink and grey with stubble.

I'm distracted with the wheelchair. I look out again and he's drifting back to the bicycle once more, like maybe none of these people standing around will notice if he steals it slowly? He looks at me.

I shake my finger at him with a grin, my index finger wagging back and forth: "no-no-no you don't," a teacher’s gesture echoing from long-ago preschool, stored in time for just this moment.

Taciturn is beside himself. He's a logical man, and Grey Man isn't. I hear spittle in Taciturn's voice as he tries to understand. "Wha–? What are you DOING?!? That's not your bike! Tha's my bike! Don't touch it! Man, get the fuck away from here–"

Sometimes a push is all you need.

Grey Man somehow doesn't fall down. He slinks away, first maybe toward the doughnut place, then no, maybe I'll go across the street or something. He drifts across Aurora Avenue's seven-lane expanse with gentle composure, never mind the honking cars, never mind the angry man and oppositional cluster of men behind him. A fox who lives to fight another day.

Taciturn returns to his chair, and the others reboard. Time has returned to itself. He was exactly who he needed to be, in that moment. He had the confident forward propulsion of a (wo)man who doesn’t question himself. His able, self-involved strength, melded with his lack of fear in speaking up; the universe presented this problem to the person best-equipped for handling it. Critically, he was also, like me, a person who never wears headphones in public. Had he been so, he wouldn’t have heard my announcement and would have lost a bicycle.

---

He yells up toward me from his seat after a moment of reflection. He cups his hand like a megaphone to project his voice, the better to ensure I hear him: “Thank you bus driver!”

I’m still with my wheelchair-related companions when his exhortation cuts through the public silence, travelling through them and on up to me. It takes a moment to recognize his words; they are unexpected.
“Anytime, anytime!” I reply, my open hand raised in the air, a stationary wave.

When he eventually deboarded, he scurried up to his bicycle along the outside of the bus as per his usual, from the back doors and past my open front door, at which point I called out: “Have a good night!”
He pauses. He stops. He comes back, leaning around the open door. “Ey. Thanks for doin’ that. Thank you, mang.”

Sometimes people speak to you with their eyes. The voice is an afterthought, a supplement. Look at his eyes, the dead-dog seriousness of his face now benevolent. Now receiving.
“Happy to help,” I said.
“For real though.” He wanted me to know. Wanted me to know he felt it.
“Always," I replied, my hands in supplicating prayer-gratitude mode, a gesture of respect I’ve picked up from the street and made my own over the years, then my hand on my heart, for truth. He put his fist to his heart also, mirroring me. I watched him grab his bicycle, an effortless economy of motion separate from his reflecting thoughts. He flashed the ‘westside’ fingers at me as he walked off. I had earned my way into his respect.

But more importantly I remembered his eyes, in the open doorway. How they both contrasted and melded with the stillness of his deep and present voice. Something soft was in there. Something early. It felt like a moment of learning: This is something people do for other people sometimes. Sometimes people are good to each other, for no reason. With no expectation at all.

I watched him have that thought. Do you know how special that is? To witness the gentle surprise of it. The world includes this, too. Amongst all this, amongst the selfish solitary broken Now, there are also people who care, and who demonstrate that through action. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I wasn’t proud. I hadn’t done anything. I’d only done my job. I was thinking about him. I felt the moment from his eyes. Appreciated. Respected, cared for. Sometimes people do like this.

I watched him have the newness of that thought.

Perhaps he’d had it before, but you could tell it had been a long while. There are things we believed in childhood, that we no longer believe, that may still be true. That are still true.

Sometimes it's enough to bring me to tears.

This is the second in a series of three texts that are exciting and meaningful to me. Don't you enjoy how standing in front of someone's bookcase tells you things no other method of learning about them could? This series is a bit of my mental bookcase. My first essay was on Steinbeck's East of Eden. My second, below, is on a painting not many know about.

2. Annunciate Madonna, by Antonello da Messina, 1476. Oil on wood; 17.5 in x 13.6 in.

Currently in Palermo, Sicily. Click here for an up-close, full-size version of the painting, courtesy of Wikipedia.

People don’t talk about Antonello da Messina when they talk about Early Renaissance Italian art. They talk about Botticelli. They talk about Piero Della Francesca. Maybe they talk about Fra Filippo Lippi. But who was Antonello? Where’s Messina? How many artists have worked alone with passion and skill, in unknown rooms?

Something compels me about these hidden lives, the daily truths lived, textures of ordinary existence and struggle untainted by the anomalies of wealth and attention. In school I gravitated toward the classmate who sat in the corner of the room or alone at their lunch table, just as I now find myself drawn toward these souls. Perhaps because I am one of them.

The onward flow of the human project is embodied most fully not by rulers and despots but by people on the ground, those with dirt in their fingernails and whose souls are just as deep with experience filled to bursting, but who from the outside we forget to take notice. The divide would have felt wider for Antonello, as the royal court spoke different languages (Catalan, Aragonese) than the citizenry (Sicilian) at the time. The plates and jars and clothes of these peasants, masons, carriers, maids, smiths, cooks… do not survive in museums. Their dreams and ideas are recorded only broadly. These are the people I write about today.  

1. The Times

Born in Messina in 1430, where he would later return to die only 49 years later, Antonello lived under the receding shadow of the Black Death, by his lifetime part of the past but no doubt a recurring event in the perspectives and guiding principles of his elders. He would have heard stories growing up. Messina was a port city on the island of Sicily, and in 1347 “death ships” were sent to Messina from the Genoese city of Kaffa (now the disputed Feodosia Municipality in Crimea) and other eastern cities along the Asian trade routes. These ships were filled to the brim with dead and dying plague victims, who were then dumped on the island. Naturally this resulted in widespread death of Sicilian residents and the rapacious spread of the Plague into mainland Italy and Europe at large. Antonello wouldn’t be born for another hundred years, but what impact did being raised in the aftershock of this landscape have? How would it have affected the prevailing belief systems of the day?

Writes historian Jennifer Hecht in her excellent Doubt: A History, “we simply do not know how much Christianity ever penetrated the great mass of peasants and workers of Medieval Europe…. Rural priests complained that their flocks showed up at church to gossip and play, and that when they took part they barely knew what they were saying.” Remember, the printing press and thus the Bible wouldn’t proliferate until well after 1453, and although Christianity was the sociocultural reference point for all classes in 1400s Italy, a new religious cynicism was spreading, partly as a result of the Church's wars on heresy and imposed economic turmoil. Historian Giulio Ferroni writes that this “lent greater importance ‌among the middle classes to the tangible and utilitarian aspects of life.” Then as now, times were complicated, and as ever there is so much we don't know. Not much is written about Messina in the 1400s, other than a university being built in nearby Catania, a slightly larger city and over a day’s journey on foot. Did Antonello think about this? Did he ever go there? We don’t know.

2. The Craft

We believe he apprenticed in Rome and then moved to Napoli, where Netherlandish painting was in vogue. He loved Van Eyck. He loved the Flemish tendency toward infinitesimal detail and careful attention to minute gradations of light. We think he was in contact with Van Eyck’s follower Petrus Christus in 1456, and suspect that Antonello taught Petrus Italian linear perspective; Christus is the first Netherlandish artist to employ the approach.

Correspondingly, Antonello likely learned something of the northern tradition from Petrus, as Antonello is the first major artist in Italy to replicate Van Eyck’s oil-based, detail-oriented style. He must have gulped down these Netherlandish tendencies, because his work positively blooms with the approach: hyper-detailed minutiae, attention to light (down to the consideration of how light would land on light-absorbent objects like dark fabric), black backgrounds, frontal portraits (a novelty depending on where you were in Europe), and a tendency toward calmness and the enigmatic in facial expression and tone. Remember, this is before da Vinci. Writes Ingrid Rowland, “No one, not even Leonardo or Piero della Francesca, has ever paid such penetrating attention to the way light works. He knew nothing of photons or electromagnetic waves, but he understood, and recorded with uncanny penetration, the differences among beams, rays, reflections, glow, luminosity, and radiance. At the same time, he was a master of psychological detail and of nature, taking care to paint the reflections of infinitesimal ducks on a distant pond.”

Why is the best-known portrait of Antonello vandalized? Why do portraits show him smirking, raising an eyebrow, or displaying other intriguingly quizzical touches? When a man leaves behind more questions than answers, we lean in. Giorgio Vasari, the preeminent Italian art historian responsible for as much fiction as fact, never travelled further south than Napoli, which is one reason why Antonello isn’t well-known. His accounts of Antonello are brief and disputed, written nearly a century later at a time when Tiziano’s entirely different style was the reigning subject of conversation. Vasari claims Antonello apprenticed with Van Eyck, which certainly never happened since Antonello was 11 when Van Eyck died; on the basis of nothing he also claims Antonello decided to live in Venice forever because of “pleasures and everything else to do with sex,” sounding suspiciously like a 16th-century version of The National Enquirer.

The once-presupposed theory that Antonello majestically toured Northern Europe and its most famous painters’ workshops is now replaced by the more plausible understanding that the poor man came across a couple Van Eyck paintings on display in a 1445 visit to Napoli, and was thus inspired. What can be said is Antonello played at least some role in introducing oil paint to Venetian painting, as art in Venice (Bellini et al) looks different before versus after his visit there.

3. The Ephemeral

The other reason Antonello isn’t well-known has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with circumstance: Messina wasn’t only ravaged by the Plague. In 1783 and again in 1908, the city (located on a fault line, evidently not a concern when the Greeks founded it in 730 BCE) suffered two diabolically cataclysmic earthquakes, especially the 1908 iteration. That event leveled nine-tenths of the city’s buildings in under thirty seconds, with a subsequent tsunami and three hundred aftershocks decimating the rest. Only one of Antonello’s Messina altarpieces survives, and with heavy flood-induced water damage at that; most of the thirty remaining paintings we know of come from the brief year he spent in Venice in 1475-6, just a few years before his death. Scholars assume about ninety percent of his work is lost.

What did he think about? What compelled him to paint snails and cats and potted plants in the backgrounds of his pieces? To paint Jesus “as a blunt-faced, almost homely man,” to use Ingrid Rowland’s words, “his reddened eyes brimming with tears and his mouth downturned in desolate sadness”? You look at a painting from 600 years ago and you recognize yourself, not in the face but the attitude of the brush: the same secret longings, the same confused awe at an inexplicable universe... look at us, trying to understand. Maybe no time has passed at all.

Some say he had a son; another record shows he gave away a daughter to marriage. Maybe both are true. Two Sicilian scholars (Gioacchino Di Marzo and Gaetano La Corte Callier) assembled a life history of Antonello just before the 1908 earthquake, in which those painstaking compilations were promptly destroyed. We do know he was offered the role of court painter in Milan, but declined on the basis of Lord Galeazzo Maria’s tyrannical tendencies. Smart man, I say. Fame and fortune aren’t everything.

4. The Long Gaze

Most artists don’t live to see their work admired; Antonello did not live, thankfully, to see the vast majority of his work destroyed. But the difference between one surviving piece and none is much greater than the difference between a few works surviving and many, and we at least have these thirty paintings. I believe he would be appreciated now if even only one of his pieces survived: his Annunciate Madonna (above), from 1476. Aside from oddly persistent simplification that Antonello “brought oil painting to Italy,” you could argue his reputation today stems primarily from this single image. What sets it apart from other paintings and artists of the time? Writes Rowland:

“Of all Antonello’s paintings, the most remarkable, perhaps, is his Annunciate Madonna, a young woman who pulls a glorious true blue mantle close around her as she takes in the message the angel Gabriel has just delivered: she is to bear the son of God. Her right hand stretches out as if to pause the angel’s headlong announcement—or time itself—a brilliant exercise in foreshortening and a still more brilliant exercise in light, shade, luminosity, and the minute highlights that led curator Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa to call this ‘the greatest hand in Renaissance art.’

Many of Antonello’s Madonnas are plain-featured, with relatively short, small noses, in dramatic contrast to their aquiline-featured Byzantine counterparts or the long, haughty pointed profiles of the Dalmatian sculptor Francesco Laurana. But as two women passed by her image in Palermo recently, I heard one say to the other, “Now that’s a real Sicilian face. She’s siciliana, siciliana. I have a niece who looks just like her.” …[T]his Madonna, and her counterparts, for their very ordinariness, manage to create something more marvelous than transcendent beauty: the miraculous illusion of reality.”

Compare that to this Madonna of the same event, painted by the same artist three years earlier.

Much is the same– a young woman wearing a blue robe is interrupted in her reading. There is the black background, in true Netherlandish fashion. Yes. There are artfully painted hands.

But this isn’t even the same ball game.

In this 1473 version, Mary has already heard the ‘big news,’ or is perhaps in the process of hearing it just now. Its import, in either case, has already landed by the time of the moment depicted. She’s taking in the size of what she’s heard with reverence, and her reaction isn’t surprising: it’s a momentous moment, and she reacts accordingly. This is in keeping with earlier medieval art which, beautiful as it is, tends toward the decorative or instructional, with human faces often repetitive and mostly blank ciphers. These were images less of people than of ideas. The Renaissance involved integrating Classical Greek ideas from sculpture (not from paintings, which were all lost) into contemporary religious art. At the time this combination would have been an anachronism, but it achieves wonders in elevating the work. Compare Cavallini’s 1293 Last Supper with Leonardo’s famous 1498 version of the same scene:

Human psychology is the main event of Leonardo’s piece; each disciple reacts to Jesus’ announcement of betrayal differently. There’s a lot to take in. No such nuance is visible in Cavallini’s piece (for a middle ground, check out Ugolino da Siena’s 1325 effort):

If Antonello’s 1473 Madonna seems more tied to past periods, to earlier Medieval ideas of depiction– albeit with his trademark detail and care– the 1476 version is more of a piece with painting’s future: the Renaissance and all it would bring. I find it richer and more redolent of the multitudinous variations of human existence. Look at the full-blooded withholding of her face. Its ambiguity, discipline, quietude… holds us like a magnet. Antonello chooses an ethereal slice of being just after the big moment– or is it before? Perhaps Gabriel hasn’t even spoken yet. Mary holds out that now-famous hand in a gesture of staying, holding off what she doesn’t yet know is big news. She was reading. Not yet, she seems to say.

Equally legitimate is the interpretation that she’s taking in what’s just been said to her. The news is too large for her to have an assembled response. Is she rejecting the idea? As in, No, that can’t possibly be me? Or is she accepting with grace and benevolence, rising into a new form of being? Either way she seems at once earthly in her tactility, and divine in her demeanor. On another plane, even while of this world.

What other masterworks did Antonello paint, I wonder, which are forever lost to us? Were there works which surpassed even this one? Do lost legacies leave behind a phantom sensation of presence, in the way amputees can still feel pain in their absent limbs? I look upon this painting and experience something different than when I appreciate work by the better-known masters.

This one is loaded.

I look upon her face, the robe, the austere black and the impossibly truthful light and hand, and I see the 1908 earthquake. I see buildings levelled in seconds. Survivors picking through rubble. I see the biography those two historians gathered and composed, buried under stone.

Loss, ephemerality, death: these are the galvanizing elements which teach us most about valuing things. Her face contains for me the heft of unknown secrets, mysteries known only to time, the oldest of surviving trees and rocks in the Messinan countryside.

The Greek ruins at Paestum as I found them in 2015, five hours north of Messina by car. Built 900 years before Antonello's time.

Sources:

Cardona, Caterina, et al. Antonello Da Messina: Inside Painting. Milano, Skira Editore, 2019.
Cohn, Samuel K Jr. “Epidemiology of the Black Death and successive waves of plague.” Medical history. Supplement ,27 (2008): 74-100.
Ferroni, Giulio. Storia della letteratura italiana vol. I "Dalle origini al Quattrocento." Turin: Einaudi, 1991.
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt : A History. New York, Harpercollins, 2004.
Rowland, Ingrid D. “‘A Painter Not Human.’” www.nybooks.com, www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/antonello-messina-painter-not-human/?lp_txn_id=1286657. Accessed 20 Oct. 2021.

I was once asked to name 3 texts– whether books, film, music or otherwise– which are meaningful to me. After spending too much time excitedly mulling over the idea, I thought I'd share my answer here on the blog as well. I'm avoiding formative texts I've discussed elsewhere, like Underworld, Anna Karenina, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Radiation City, Terrence Malick or any of the many films I've written about here. I'm also avoiding non-fiction because I'm more interested in advocating for art than information. Information speaks for itself, but Art elevates us to something higher. Each of the following represents a full, rich experience which has elevated how I see. Here goes.

3. East of Eden
John Steinbeck, 1952. 612pp.

Why read the old books?

Steinbeck's East of Eden paints a reality we can feel in the marrow of our bones. The brushstroke that is his pen paints the truth of his experience and that of turn-of-the-century rural America with deep-rooted thoughtfulness, a probing consideration of the grit, texture and light that was once oh-so-familiar, by someone who was there. His pen knows the details and lived-in psyche of a certain breed of American experience that a writer now, for all their historocity and enlightened perspectives, will fail to comprehend. We must preserve the earlier works, and value them for what they do, rather than what they don't do. If we don't know our past, how can we build a future?

Steinbeck's concerns are not primarily historical or political, but human. His interests transcend time and culture. He observed the goings-on around him with undeniable and clear-eyed care, and the insights one gains from reading East of Eden are as enriching toward deepening our worldview as any of the best philosophy or religious texts. Go ahead and pull it off the shelf. Read Chapter Thirteen– don't worry, it doesn't spoil anything. Read it while alone, and dare yourself to look at today's world with the same eyes afterwards. For me it's the chapters involving the conversations between Sam, Lee and Adam that I'll carry with me forever. Do you remember when they talk about naming the children? The kindness and infinite depth of their discourse? Or his understanding of Cathy, probably the most nuanced exploration of implacable evil and the question of confronting it that I've found in art. This is why you read classic literature instead of Tweets of headlines of articles. This is why you turn pages instead of send texts and play Candy Crush.

Many years ago, I was riding a 41 home and asked the young-ish looking businessman seated next to me what he was reading. He explained that he made a point of returning to East of Eden every five years or so, because it enriched his sight and kept him on course. It seemed to expand each time he read it too, telling him something about himself, and about the America we come from. I remember a quiet passion in his demeanor; he had a father's knowledge that gentle persuasion will work better than vociferous insistence. He didn't tell me to read the book. He simply shared what it did for him. I told him I'd check it out sometime. It may have taken me over a decade to make good on that promise, but here I am, thanking a man whose name I don't know, whose appearance I've forgotten, whom I remember only by their poise and words. The book was everything you said it would be. I do all I can do now, which is pass the torch along.

---

Stay tuned for the countdown!

I don't consider myself a political creature. The transformation of my perspectives into political views is always a transformation of reduction. I find people too rich and nuanced, the world and its problems too complex, for the American obsession of turning everything into a competition to have any value. Ideas on ethics, rights, justice and progress, fundamental and important as they are, should least of all be subjected as fodder for a hyped-up contest with only two sides. Could there be a more awkward fit?

You might imagine that, what with my immigrant background, enthusiasm for the rights of marginalized peoples, support for maligned and subjugated demographics, and livelihood resulting from subsistence on Unions (I'll always capitalize Union!), that pegging which voting body I vote for would be too easy. In one sense you would be right. I'll never run out of bad things to say about Reagan, Nixon, Bush and Trump.

But.

It's just not that simple. There are as many attitudes co-opted by the Left that I find insufferable as on the Right. If you have to ask what those are, forgive me for lovingly venturing to suggest that you might be in too deep! The game of politics has become the game of judging others, creating distance and putting people in boxes so they can be written off. Such things wouldn't even be appropriate on an elementary playground. What do the children think of us?

There are life lessons I've learned from red-staters I put into practice every day. Moments I've appreciated with people I know vote differently than me, people whom I respect, have worked with, listen to. I'm tired of judging people. Aren't you? Doesn't it feel better to find common ground together? Isn't it invigorating rather to carry within you the Emerson quote, "every (wo)man is my master, in that I may learn from him?"

Think about this the next time you're tempted to fall into the Game. If you're in small-town middle America on the side of a road with a flat tire, a Republican will pull over and help you fix your tire. A Democrat will instead go blazing past without stopping, but will vote for infrastructure programs that help people with such problems. Which is the ideal solution?

Both. Obviously.

Democratic Left is a New York quarterly print magazine published by the Democratic Socialists of America. They've published a piece of mine in their latest issue without ever asking my political background, and for no other reason than that my piece compelled them. Maybe it will compel you too.  I'm a humanist, and humanism transcends the pesky labels we like to throw around these days.

If you live in NYC, pick up a copy! If you're elsewhere, click below for the article, which is about Seattle's crisis state and what we can do about it:

Give Us Shelter: A Bus Driver’s Story

And, further reading on related topics by yours truly:

• Understanding Love & Hate During Trump Nation
• More than Health, More than Money
• On Tom McCarthy's Stillwater
  

Felt this way before.

These are sensations I have before today appreciated. But distance away can clarify things, bring into sharp relief what you've forgotten was never ordinary.

I've been away from the 7 for over a year now for a collection of boring reasons, mostly pandemic and schedule-related (where did the breaks go?). Today I took a rare overtime shift to cover an expense, and when you take on overtime you don't get much say in the route; you take what's available, which was a C Line. But when you've got a C Line and you're Nathan, you do what you have to do, which is get to the base early and ask all the operators in sight if they're by chance about to do a 7, and could we please trade? Pretty please?

I'm pretty sure I made Amrit's day by trading my C for his 7. He didn't know when he woke up this morning that he'd get off an hour earlier doing a route he infinitely prefers! Amrit looked at me with pleasant surprise bordering on confusion, as in, is this guy for real? You actually want this?

Did I ever. I had to stop myself from skipping as I walked up to the relief point and took over the big monster, piloting a trolley bus for the first time in a year-plus, taking the turn off Jackson slowwww, the way you do when you're relishing every moving second of the new day.

After driving diesels in various far-flung and (currently) underpopulated corners of the county, I can say that driving trolleys in town is an altogether different job. I'm frankly surprised they carry the same rate of pay. There is so much more density to process and handle within each moment, from the coach to the wire to the cars to the pedestrians to your riders. There is the anticipation of problems, the need to read people faster and with greater stakes at hand. Time rubs against you lightly; you're living closer to the leading edge, where everything's happening at once and the best parts of yourself aren't just a help, but necessary to the success of this moment.

---

Of course there were the familiar faces. Melody is now in a wheelchair and the better for it, no longer wincing in pain at every step, able to smile more easily– though she always did, even when things were hard. She updates me on another regular, Charlene, who's broken her arm but is surviving. I'm touched she wanted me to know; she knew I would care.

There's a man seated next to Melody who might be her friend, might not be- it's not so clear-cut, in a community where strangers talk to each other. The distinction loses importance.
"That was nice a you," he grunted after I waited for a running passenger running the long run from Goodwill up to the King Street bus stop. He and I both know the stop was once much closer, and the knowledge of that shared history makes me more forgiving with runners there. You act differently when you know a place.

I notice more people using the front door to exit, which I like and encourage; more community, more chances to say thank you and interact. Bean-counters may not see the value in such things, but we out here do; a bus has the potential to be far more than a travelling bottom line. Yes, society today discourages real-world connection... but that doesn't mean we've stopped hungering for it. We have always been the social animal, and we will not outgrow our wiring in a lifetime.

Here's former regular Mia, bringing me fancy water from her trip to the store. Here's a young man smiling with eyes of recognition over his mask, giving me a fistpound through the shield glass, the way we used to with our bare hands. Do you remember how much we once touched each other?

I honk and wave at the folks sitting in "the circle," a half-ovular piece of landscaping on Henderson that forms the entry point to "the path," a walkway leading to the backside of Safeway that you're told to avoid at night. I recognized the three people sitting there getting day-drunk in the afternoon sun, and they lit up with joyous surprise at my double-tap and wave. Has any other bus honked hello at them since I did, pre-pandemic? I did so repeatedly as the day wore on, with the accumulating newer neighborhood faces seated there acclimating to this idea, a happy bus driver who says hi to us.

Makes no sense, but we'll take it.

---

The neighborhood continues to change. Many was the new apartment building I'd never seen before, complete with the American tendency toward utter architectural ignorance of history and place– but I looked for what, or whom, had the resilience to still be standing a year later. Look at that stalwart figure panhandling on the corner at Seward Park Avenue, antsy and alert, with an expression carved by time right out of Evans or Robert Frank, ignored by the smartphone-surfing white resident walking past. I have to wave. I have to give him true, real eye contact and respect, the kind he isn't getting from the new neighbors.

Another neighbor is sweeping the sidewalk at inbound Henderson. When did you last see someone volunteering to sweep up not their driveway or walk-up, but the public bus stop? Stewardship never became the buzzword many predicted it would, but in places like this, where the words neighborhood and community are still interchangeable, it lives on. Through my open doors I call out, "hey, thank you for cleanin' up the neighborhood! I appreciate it!" He responds with a friendly nod.

At a short break I connect with Karen, another operator, talking together about the breaks. As an aside she says, except the recovery time "there's nothing wrong with this route–" and I smile inwardly, inspired. How many good things does that say about her outlook, priorities, her good character? No one says that about the 7.

In comes Jennifer, who responds to my attempt to place her by explaining we went to high school together ("Ms. Ledesma's math class!"). As she prepares to exit I wave her up, saying, "I don't usually drive at this time so it's unlikely I'll see you again. How's life??"
She projects confidence, the relaxed peace with oneself neither of us had twenty years ago. I tell her about my day, bubbling over. "Routes like this bring me a lot of joy."
"You're rare," she laughed.
I'm just learning from my favorite colleagues, I think to myself, remembering Karen. We inspire each other with the best parts of our imperfect selves.

---

Not everything on the 7 makes sense. Here's a collection of jackets and rags draped around a figure, a mixture of neon athletic wear and fluid-soaked undergarments stumbling into the street at northbound Genesee. What's he doing, I wonder as I amble closer with my bus.

He's pouring out liquid detergent from the bottle into lanes 1 and 2 of Rainier Avenue, waving it around in arcing splash-patterns only he understood. Is he cleaning the streets like our earlier street-sweeper was, if with a more gonzo touch?

No. He's making himself a water bottle. He returns to the sidewalk drinking fountain with his now-empty detergent bottle and begins the process of rinsing it out, or trying to, all the while gyrating with wild rhythmic enthusiasm to the hot beat coming from the battered '90s minivan in front of me. He sees me through my glass doors and calls out cheerily in a language I can't understand, say-singing to me as his body bounces up and down, his detergent bottle occasionally filling up amidst all his chaotic excitement. It's as complete a portrait I can imagine of the happy, zany absurdity of bus-driving life I so relish and appreciate.

However, the 7 and everything I love about it was most fully summed up by a different incident, earlier in the day. Melody's personable maybe-friend, mentioned above, was still on the bus and seated up front. Toward the back, two boisterous friends, a man and woman, perhaps coworkers or college classmates, were laughing it up together.

Were they laughing at me? As an operator you often suspect that, but as a frequent passenger I know it's usually not so. As ever in life, it's usually not about you!

But I'm more of a presence on the bus than many an operator. I call out the stops, greet everyone, yell out thank you as folks jump out. And I think I was new to the duo in the back, and thought I heard them discussing bus drivers. Who cares if they laugh at you, I reminded myself. You don't do this so people will like you. You do it because it makes you feel good. If they like you that's extra.

---

The two friends got off at Laetitia. So did another man, a solitary forty-something fellow with dark sunglasses, shaved head and a polo, following them out the back door. They walked forward, toward the red light I was now waiting for. Mr. Sunglasses walked behind the back of the bus and dodged across Rainier's four lanes, now also walking forward toward the intersection but on the other side of the street. My bus driver brain clicked: something missing here. The picture's not quite right.

That's it: the bicycle. He'd gotten on with a bike. I honked and honked again, softer at first and then really laying on it, lay-tapping in irregular rhythms to get his attention, my window open and waving out, never mind that everyone's staring now. You've just gotta do it.

But he doesn't hear me. I decide to yell.
"EEYYYY!"
What is it about the human voice that works so well?

He looks up and over, responding to my wave but unsure why.
Me, pointing to the rack, at the top of my lungs: "Do you want your bicycle???"
"Oh, sshhhhhhiiitt!!!" he yells. The word has never before played as a roar of equal parts recognition and gratitude, but that's what he made it now, springing into action and athletically dodging back across Rainier, arriving in front of my bus in seconds flat, me lowering the front of the bus to expedite.

"DAYUMN," he breathes, shaking his head and looking at me. My doors and window are open and I can hear him as he adds loudly, "you really are one of the best."
Melody's friend in the front seat has witnessed it all and echoes the sentiment. The two laughing companions are now standing outside by the front of the bus, having seen everything too. Whatever they were saying before is erased as they look at me anew. The woman leans toward my front doors to say with conviction, "You are amazing. Seriously." Her friend: "you're a hella cool bus driver, for real." The sincerity in his eyes reached right through me, eager with the need to tell me this sort of caring happening in the real world meant something to him.

I thanked them with hands in supplication and a half-bow that was only partly in jest, grateful for their appreciation and respect–  which was more exciting to me than anything I'd just done. The light turned green and a white Chevy Prizm to my left began to move forward too. There was a young girl in the backseat of who'd watched the whole thing and understood, and she smile-waved at me till she was out of sight.

---

The moment would echo throughout the later afternoon, as people conveyed their gratitude with gestures of their own. An Ethiopian woman getting off through the middle doors at Henderson, nodding thanks to me with her hand on her heart, as I sometimes do. The Chinese grandmothers at 12th Avenue, eyes wide with delighted recognition. How is it they remembered me, tiny blip in their lives that I must be?? Or another woman walking past my open door at the terminal, who'd been on earlier, with deep surprise in her grateful eyes. I can still see that look.

This outpouring of love toward me is of course gratifying, a humbling gift I'm thankful for, but it also has me worried: how are these folks being treated generally, such that what I'm doing– which I don't think is all that much– is cause for such vocal thanks? What have these folks become accustomed to? How is it they value my sweet nothings (as it were) so much more than other neighborhoods do?

Only they can answer. For myself I can merely say I'm thrilled they're able to somehow perceive my joy at being out here, my appreciation for their respect and my desire to serve. The exchange feels so equal, so unique compared to my experiences in more affluent neighborhoods. Nothing described above takes place in those areas, or occasionally at best; whereas all the above is from a single day. These moments of communities coming together, of strangers reaching out with love and togetherness, are to me life-giving, intoxicating, a rejuvenation that makes me forget the passage of time.

That's not to say I don't appreciate the peaceful quietude of my current northern routes. I'm happy to pick up an entire generation whose idea of communicating is playing with their phones.

But boy, do they not know what they're missing.

Recently a woman yelled up toward me, "there's a guy smoking crack in the back of the bus! Tell him to get off!"

To which I immediately replied, into the microphone and at the young twentysomething man furtively kneeling over in the back bench, "okay my buddy in the back, we can't be doin' that in here. Gotta take it outside. I know it's hard, but outta respect for everyone else in here, there's no smokin' crack on the bus. Yup, that's one of the rules..."

And so on. The woman left us; it was her stop. After she had, the man stood up and earnestly said, entirely convincingly, that "I was just picking up some trash, that's all! God. I don't know why she was picking on me like that. Probably just 'cause I look like a bum or something."

I stared at him. Whom do you believe, in a moment like that? I had nothing to go off of. I had to admit I hadn't seen him smoking anything. Between the two, his words seemed more plausible to me, uttered with the heartfelt indignation of being falsely accused. Also, the woman was gone, and I needed to get along with who's still on the bus. Which meant this guy.

After an awkward pause I said, not through the mic anymore but just with a friendly raised voice, the better to be more personable, "I'm sorry, dude. I misunderstood the situation. I apologize."
"Naw bro, you're cool. You're always good to me."
"Thanks man. I didn't mean to embarrass you, I's just trying to figure out..."
"Oh it's totally cool. People're always pickin' on me. You're one of the good ones, man, seriously. You're always respectful to everyone. We appreciate it."

He got off at the next stop, by the now-defunct encampment in Lake City. Immediately after he did, another person who'd been sitting in the back now piped up. This young man, a hospital employee and regular rider on his way home, said, "he was smoking crack. I saw him loading his pipe and everything."
"Shoot. Thanks for letting me know. Well. Now I feel like an idiot! I have no idea what's going on from way up here!"
"Oh no, it's whatever!"

What compels people to distort the truth in their favor? Everyone does it a little, but there are a special insecure few who prey on the gullible beliefs of others. We might label this as cruel; I'd prefer to call it lonely. Imagine the pressure of trying to get by in a world of peers who seem to have it together, who don't give you their attention. I know I'm flawed, you may think in that situation, but how can I hide that from the world?

Youngsters make mistakes like the rest of us, only they don't know it's okay to admit it. They don't know everyone else is imperfect too, and there's no need to try so hard. Thank goodness our brains dwell on the positives of childhood... because we forget how hard it is. Do you remember the stress, the anxiety of pretending you've got it together when you don't, searching for ways to conceal your embarrassment or shame?

When do we discover we don't need to do that?

I believe the young man was so convincing in defending himself because a part of him really wanted it to be true. We build up lies to cover up our embarrassments, and his lies had more adamant conviction than the two other people's truths. Why? Perhaps because he had a bigger stake. He needed those listening to believe him, because if we believed him we would be unable to perceive his guilt and shame. And I'm as gullible a person as you'll find; since I'm always trying for kindness, I assume others are too. I trust in the goodness of people, and though I've suffered greatly on a few occasions as a result, I'd still conclude it's brought me more good than harm. My book and blog wouldn't even exist if I was darkly suspicious, assuming the worst in everyone.

How would I have reacted if he'd told the truth? I'd have felt gladdened by the courage of his vulnerability, closer rather than further from him. But how would he have felt, I wonder? It makes sense to hide his illegal behavior, but I like to imagine him trusting I'd still treat him as human; discovering with relief that he didn't have to pretend in order for me to respect him. Is there a greater anxiety than projecting a false version of yourself to others as a way of hiding from your real problems?

I think he felt more accosted by the fact of someone designating him as inhuman, as a failure. When he told me he was innocent, he wasn't trying to convince me he was drug-free so much as human, real, unique, more than a statistic. And he knew from previous rides with me that I understood that about him, no matter his current circumstances. Our subsequent exchange of respect was as truthful as anything else spoken in those five minutes, and perhaps more resonant. I hope he felt appreciated by me.

We make the best decisions we can with the information we have. Which of today's addicted souls will live long enough to transition to a different modus of problem-solving? Who will render today's misdeeds a distant regret, paved over by insight and better experience? I'm hopeful he'll be among that lot. As I parked my bus and headed home, the moment from the day I carried most gladly in my pocket wasn't the reporting woman or clarifying hospital worker but the young man's smile, the smile of someone appreciating kindness and doing their best in the situation they've been handed, trying, however imperfectly, to get through the day.

You'll make it, friend. You still had your spark in the lowest moments. I saw it.

I'll see you down the road.

There is a bewilderment that sets in with age. We look around ourselves in mild confusion, heavy from invisible blows, unable to summon the energy to do much more than wonder, and hopefully marvel. What world is this that swirls around me, and when did it replace the one I thought I knew?

It sometimes happens that older people, in having lived for a longer time, are more likely to have made mistakes and therefore be forgiving of others who have misstepped also. To be understanding. Sometimes they're more prone to recognize a person is greater than their worst moment, and that people have the capacity to grow, learn, improve.

Certain other folks, sometimes younger, have the privilege of knowing none of the above. They have the luxury of being unforgiving. They can be didactic in their morality, without compromise, and not know their error. I've done this. But life is not so clear-cut. Life is the trick of accepting multiple truths, and holding them in one hand.

There was a time when I would have looked down at Matt Damon's character in Stillwater (2021, in theatres now) and judged him, written him off as another Oklahoma redneck, defining him by his reductive political views, prejudices, and lack of culture.

I can no longer do that.

The simple fact is that life is more complicated. As director Tom McCarthy points out (more below) about his film's protagonist and others like him, many of these people don't spend a lot of time thinking or talking about politics. That's often more of an urban pastime. The immediate concerns and realities of America's rural poor are the ones we forget about when we chastise them.

Also, if the journey of one's twenties is largely the journey of coming to terms with one's own insignificance, I, as someone in my mid-thirties, am simply unable to consider myself worthy of judging others. Who am I to deem what "culture" is, or assert my definitions of better and worse on another's experience? We grow when we try to understand people, not when we demonize them. We begin to see they are like us: flawed and confused and trying to get by. Doing their best with what they have.

McCarthy's excellent new film, Stillwater, has no political axe to grind and sees Damon's protagonist as merely the product of his environment that he is, trying to negotiate a world larger than he ever imagined. He thinks he can fix everything. McCarthy deftly interweaves the bewilderment that comes with aging described above with the different and humbling confusion of realizing one isn't the hero one always thought oneself to be. Casting Matt Damon is a clever move: he brings a baggage of extreme competence from other films. We assume he'll win. But his– perhaps our– notions of American individualism, exceptionalism, and moral authority are in for a wakeup call. We are left finally at the film's end with a moment of reflection I find both crushingly real and strangely optimistic. It's never too late for an awakening, and they often happen of their own accord, almost in spite of ourselves.

This is something to be thankful for.

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Avoid the film's trailer, which amusingly misadvertises it as a thriller! Check out these interviews with the director instead:

• Variety: ‘Stillwater’ Director Tom McCarthy on Casting Matt Damon Against Type and Amanda Knox Criticism
  
• The Observer: How ‘Stillwater’ Director Tom McCarthy Challenged Matt Damon’s Hero Image and Tried to Capture Reality
• UpRoxx: Tom McCarthy Tells Us Why ‘Stillwater’ Is A Metaphor For America
• The Boston Globe: Tom McCarthy on cracking the case of ‘Stillwater’