I like the ten P.M. crowd.

If you drive buses through downtown at the top of this hour, you'll notice it contains what I call a "rush hour echo”– a spike in activity entirely benign in nature. These folks have just finished their swing shift jobs and they're ready to go home, grateful to see you. They have completed their toil at a panoply of interesting worksites, those places where you use your hands, developing calluses and camaraderie; the humble and hidden jobs which are not confusing but easy to explain to others, elemental, and which keep the city running. I have a soft spot for these guys.

I am one of them, after all.

Here is a tall, able-bodied regular with flowing light brown hair down to his hips, running up to the opposite corner at 9:59, almost too late as I pull up across the street. He must jet out a few minutes early every night to catch my trip. The man always waves a silent hello as he boards through the back of my E Line, and it is in appreciation of his friendly waves that I tarry for him tonight– I arrived one light cycle early and could've taken this green and left him in the dust. But no.

These are my people.

I gestured at him across the roadway, letting him know he's good. The timing allows another fellow to squeak in, a thirty-something with a well-groomed Afro, the round halo surrounding his excited face in an unapologetic '70s style. He will thank me verbally from the middle doors as he leaves later tonight– notable, in these terse and antisocial times.

In between zones in Belltown, I pull over for two figures waving their arms in the dark. I sense something of myself in their companionable yearning gestures; I know what it's like to plead to get on a bus at night. As passengers they're the sort I'm grateful to pick up. Probably coworkers, two black American gentlemen, effusive in their kind gratitude toward me and happy to be chatting with each other, their soft-spoken banter lighting up the bus's middle section.

Rounding out the crowd are a scattering of your expected E Line neighborhood flavors, but of a mellower stripe tonight. An elderly army vet, built like an ex-footballer. A woman who hears my Have a good night! at the last second, her hand waving thank you from the back after the rest of her body has already deboarded. A bedraggled grandmother twice my age with her belongings in hand, including a fishing rod and 101 Dalmatian pants, catching a nap in the back. A stentorian but amiable fellow up front I’m chatting with, who tells me what you learn as a footballer if you’re small and have a tough father: “You can’t meet force with force. You have to go around it.”

So true.

There were his thoughtful words and more, other faces you forget, the youthful outcasts you're surprised to discover do have destinations. Here is another man at the end, Aurora's answer to Gary Payton, only less lucky. We're at Aurora Village and he's very lost, asking where Salvation Army is. I perk up when I begin to realize he's actually trying to get somewhere, and he perks up when he perceives I'm giving him genuine real directions because I care, explaining the slightly confusing path for how to get there– all the way at the other terminal.

We have a good group tonight.

I really like these people. I look at them in my rear-view and smile involuntarily, deeply contented by the opportunity to serve these folks, to get to be in their presence. I feel a motherly caring for my fellow humans, and I embrace them with my bus.

This is what we can do, while the institutions slumber around us. It is what we can do as individuals, and what we have to do. In my book, I write of passenger Rachel, who once told me, “We have to allow ourselves to love so other people can receive it. People need to feel loved in their lives. It’s not just for us, it’s for them.” She phrased it as a responsibility done on behalf of others.

I know that’s harder to do now. I know you’ve heard the horror stories of this route and others. You may even have lived them, as I have. I know that in order to pick up the above people you have to pick up others who may give you grief. But can we take a moment to remember all the rest is happening too? Can we remember that during your eight-hour shift, the terrible thing that happened probably lasted less than five minutes? That we can be our best not only then, when it may accomplish little, but for the other seven hours and fifty-five, when it's just as worthwhile to let people feel acknowledged? To keep community alive?

We try for the right things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because they tell us something about ourselves, about the person we'd like to be. We try not because we will succeed. We do not expect an outcome. No, we try because doing so inches us incontrovertibly closer, curves the air around us, the listeners and futures and notions of truth, toward a better definition of things.

That is all.

---

This is a spiritual follow-up to this post: In Praise of the Swing and Grave

Although it has nothing to do with buses and almost nothing to do with cinema, I find myself drawn by "the Will Smith moment," because it has everything to do with human behavior, which we know is the only reason any of us are interested in the above two worlds in the first place.

1. A Different Stage

The uncensored video of the incident, which international audiences saw live, just plain fascinates me. It represents in microcosm a multitude of things, one of which is rarely to be found on television: I appreciated seeing a moment of actual true emotions, expressed with zero pretense. In watching the sort of exchange I'm rather more familiar with seeing on the nighttime street, I realized how much context can make a thing seem stranger than it is. We live in a world where the image of something seems to count more than the thing itself. But this was not the image of decorum. Here was The Thing itself, ugly and terrible but real, borne out of force and truth and shame and guilt and anger.

This was no performance; this was a man who always has to perform, and for thirty seconds decided not to. Do we decry him for this blip alongside decades of good behavior? By what standards do we measure a life with different problems than our own? In pointing fingers at others, are we trying to draw attention away from our own flaws?

Last night Will Smith responded to a perceived barb as many folks have on the 7, the E Line, or in Philly, where Mr. Smith comes from– except instead of those milieus it was in an elevated and rarefied atmosphere. The shock on people’s faces; the pregnant and confused silence as recorded by writers who were present; Rock’s shaken replies, making clear this is no stunt (as Smith’s manner in repeating his line also makes abundantly clear). We thirst for truth, and found it in an unexpected place last night. 

2. Personas

The most inexplicable part of it for me was watching Smith, who initially laughs– and not a little– at Chris Rock’s joke... and then watching him wallop Rock for precisely the same joke less than ten seconds later. I can’t help but wonder if being caught by his wife at laughing inflamed in him a desire to overreact against himself, against the shame of his own initial lackadaisical reaction.

What further intrigues me is that Smith has been very good at sustaining a nigh-universally likable public image that convincingly conveys being in control and being easy-going. While I have no expectation of someone being those things all the time, as a public figure one knows one has to moderate one’s responses disproportionately, especially in a live broadcast environment. The hitherto-unsullied degree of Smith’s reputation and his longevity in being well-liked in the industry suggest his amiable persona is probably  accurate.

He had to have known how long-lasting and ignominious the damage of such a rash action would be, to himself and those around him, and how messily it would complicate his career. I wonder if he felt a desire to rebel against an encroaching pressure of keeping a good face on at all times, as he has now so obediently done for decades. I’m reminded of Tom Cruise firing his publicist in 2005 and behaving in a way he likely found liberating and truthful, even if it cost him fans. As Sasha Stone, another journalist who was in attendance pointed out, Smith's smug confidence as he returned to his seat is entirely at odds with the Smith we think we know.

3. Damage Control

I’m also intrigued that Meredith O’Sullivan, Smith’s longtime publicist, and others (namely Denzel and Tyler Perry, as well as Nic Kidman, who stopped by to give him a hug) huddled with Smith during commercial breaks, with O’Sullivan consulting with him quietly but earnestly during every single commercial break between 'That Moment' and Best Actor. To me this implies resistance on Smith’s part to take O’Sullivan’s advice, which had to be some variation of what all celebrity apologies require to be effective:

1) taking responsibility for one’s actions,
2) acknowledging the hurt they’ve caused in a manner that suggests self-awareness, and
3) (though it’d be too soon after the event for this one) indicating a concrete plan for self-improvement.

I imagine Smith said he was willing to apologize to everyone except Rock, since that’s exactly what he ended up doing. (To no one's surprise, Smith released a predictably thoughtfully worded piece hitting all the right marks today.)

I can’t help but wonder if his rambling if heartfelt six-minute speech, waffling as it did between defending himself and apologizing to secondary and tertiary parties, made things even worse. While imperfect messiness is to be expected when forced to comment without deliberation on such a recent mistake, his lack of apology to Rock is an omission that deafened in its silence, and subsequent notices of him dancing the night away at afterparties to his own previous musical hits don’t do him any favors. 

It was a highly imperfect speech. There was an opportunity to restage the event hypothetically ("here’s what I should’ve done"); there was an opportunity to transform the moment into a teachable one ("learn from my mistake"); there was an opportunity to emphasize that people act in ways they regret ("a person is more than their worst moment; I ask for your forgiveness"); and an opportunity for Smith, a father, to iterate to boys everywhere that violence is an inappropriate response to non-violence (“yell at comedians, don’t punch them”). As Ms. Stone notes regarding abusive relationships, what follows a physical altercation is the tearful apology. I find it strange to listen to Smith extolling the virtues of love mere minutes after punching someone out in front a global audience, with the expectation that we should take both moments seriously– but such is the nature of the contradictory human animal.

4. Matters of Principle

I find more curious his unquestioning advocacy for “protecting” women, and am reminded of the great writer Susan Faludi’s articulation of the “protection racket” in her monumental study of postwar emasculation, Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man. The "protection racket" is the long-standing practice where men seek to “protect” women from other men they deem worse than they, but in the course of doing so sometimes exhibit behavior just as oppressive. I can hardly think of a better example than last night. Does Jada Pinkett Smith need Will’s "protection?” Support, certainly, but… this? In 1963 Betty Friedan argued that women are adults who can take care of themselves. Conversely, Tiffany Haddish calls Smith's reaction “the most beautiful thing I've ever seen” and “what your husband is supposed to do, right?”

Clearly mileage varies...

Either way, I believe Smith’s motivations were entirely personal, and naught to do with Jada’s honor, but his own definition of himself as a man in relation to Jada, and in relation to Rock. He wasn't thinking; he was being. The host of factors and principles which impelled him out of his seat are too myriad to name. For me, the thought of Smith noticing his wife's hurt at his own laughter at a joke made at her expense, and finding reprehensible that part of himself, is touching. How human of him to try to stamp it out, to erase with vigor and conclusiveness the actions we most regret.

Who has not been at war with the lesser versions of their self?

How easy it is to make things worse. You learn in the Chinese board game Go that some mistakes just have to be moved on from, their losses accepted, because further intervention only worsens matters. You can't fix everything. We do our best.

5. The Thing No One is Talking About

Which brings us to Chris Rock. After doing what he often does– improvising and taking chances with jokes that push the envelope, often with cutting insight, though rather less so here– Rock shifted gears, realizing the mood of the person antagonizing him was not at all in jest. I find it riveting. Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane is a positive portrayal of a strong (bald) female character, which is probably why Rock felt like chancing the joke, in poor taste though it is. Complicating the moment is Smith and Jada already being made fun of earlier in the same ceremony, as well as Rock poking fun at Jada’s expense at a previous Oscars in 2017. Will and Jada have also been having their own relationship difficulties, though I’ve made an effort not to read about that (not my business!). Basically, it’s never just the last straw. 

But the one thing no one is talking about is also the thing I find most impressive: 

The fact that Chris Rock did not strike back.

In America we think of the doer as the subject, whether in grammar or otherwise; that's why we speak of this as the "Will Smith" incident. But inaction is as powerful as action. Restraint can save the day; silence can speak louder than words.

Such non-action as Rock displayed in last night's heated moment takes guts and character, as we know from the world of the street. It is easier simply to act. Rock chooses to think first, refraining from responding physically– despite the mano-a-mano challenge in front of a massive audience of peers and strangers numbering in the millions. Susan Faludi would be impressed. A recent NYT profile of Rock detailing his newfound passion for therapy and emotional investigation now further serves to explain Rock’s reaction, unequivocally displaying how that approach has paid off. It helps to think a few chess moves ahead.

It helps to think, period.

(That Rock manages even to remain standing is its own feat, given the size difference between the two and the complete unpredictability of the event. There is a significant physiological difference between having even a slight expectation of physical conflict, and predicting none. Rock predicts none because this is the Oscars, and he still manages to keep his footing.)

That Rock regains his composure and goes about the business of presenting Best Doc (to Summer of Soul, in a moment of almost absurd irony) in under a minute is impressive. I call that consummate professionalism. He’s being paid to do a job, does so under humiliating duress, and completes his task. If either of these men is at all qualified to give a rambling six-minute monologue on an international live broadcast about the importance of tolerance and loving others, it would be Chris Rock.

6. What Didn't Happen

Additionally, Rock benefits from Smith’s overreaction in that it rather forcefully swings the spotlight away from the misfire of his own joke; without it, all our Monday morning carping would have been about Rock’s misstep as a comedian, and how comedians have a tricky job of pushing the envelope and trying to search out where the line is. That type of work, because it involves taking risks, necessarily requires that there will be mistakes. There will be moments of going too far. Like perhaps this one.

It is human to make a mistake.

If Will Smith had instead boldly walked up on stage, as he did, but instead asked for the microphone and said, "Chris, I think what you just said is hurtful and unkind. My wife has been battling this auto-immune condition for years and I'm right by her side, and because of the heartache and pain and disruption it has caused us we are unable to tolerate your wisecrack. You're better than that."

You know what would've happened. Chris Rock would've stood in cowed silence, as he did, except as a monumental dolt, and we would all nod our heads, agreeing that making fun of alopecia is, yes, a mistake. But that is not what happened. What happened is that Rock's flub will forever be a minor sidebar in the conversation of someone else's history-making overreaction, a monumental lapse of judgment which will make comedians everywhere nervous to try out their jokes, however (mis)calculated, for some time to come.

7. What I Saw

It is human to make a mistake. When I see Chris Rock I see an enthusiastic jokester who improvised a line he quickly realized would've benefited from more consideration.

When I see Jada Pinkett Smith I see an actor in failing health doing her best, here in support of her partner's big night and trying to make the best of things, tired from the beguiling fact that no matter how easy life gets, it remains primarily a series of struggles.

When I see Will Smith I see a devoted husband who saw a look from his wife and no doubt recalled their shared struggles with her illness, no doubt recalled the tearful nights and hard decisions and times shared high and low, and realized with forceful passion and deep anger that he had violated himself. That moments of painful weakness with his wife were being ridiculed in broad daylight. And he saw that he no longer wished to play along and wear a dumb grin after every comment made. That his allegiance was not to cameras or fans or even career but to his life partner. I saw a man furious with himself, furious that he had betrayed something precious to him for things less important. Who stumbled through his acceptance speech about as well as you could hope given the pressure and circumstances, who plaintively tried, and partly succeeded, to convey with inarticulate and unstudied words that he, at large and deep down, endeavors as best as he knows how, to the absolute upper limit of his human abilities, to be a good man.

Now that I do believe.

Let’s talk about it.

What of the great unwashed? “They,” who have broken your windows, stolen from you, robbed you of health and sleep, forced you out of the neighborhood? The fundamental question here becomes less what to do than how to think.

People don’t do the things they’re now doing because they’re diabolical monsters, but for rather more banal reasons better explained by things like brain chemistry and childhood trauma. What happens when these folks don’t receive care? When they reach for easily available band-aid solutions (needles, pills, straws, foil) instead of turning to longer-term systems that strike at the root of the problem (education, medication, therapy, housing)? We could blame the individuals if there were only a few isolated cases. There are not. The problem is not individual.

1. What's Goin' On

Yes, people are smoking fentanyl and doing other things on buses in profusion. Yes, there are new policies which allow unsafe behaviors and reduce quality of service. Whatever you’ve heard, this is an unusual case where the reality is more extreme. The incidents happen so frequently that for us drivers, documenting them seems pointless (though Security Incident Reports on drug use inside buses have risen from 44 in 2019 to 73 in 2020, to 398 in 2021). The new and constant refrain among operators is, Never call. No help will come. Or if it does, its hands will be tied. Non-using passengers know this too, which is why they don’t get mad at me when all I do is politely ask whoever it is to stop having a party.

No one knows better, though, that no interference is coming than the tempted downtrodden themselves. They comprehend per a new pattern of non-enforcement that smoking cigarettes, crack cocaine, inhaling fentanyl, displaying weapons and shooting heroin are all allowed on Metro buses.

Deal with it.

I have witnessed each of the above and more with regularity, and mention them here without exaggeration or hyperbole. They are simply the new facts of existence of living in Seattle, of sharing enclosed spaces with others, just as smoking once was in our nation’s airplanes, bars and offices. Seattle is trying a well-intentioned new approach, and I won’t tell you what to think about it. I will say, however, that your belief in this method’s efficacy may be linked to how much face time you’ve actually spent at the intersections and streets named here, and which buses you ride and at what times. The tone among my transit-dependent riders has changed; now they tell me they’re saving up to buy a car, confessing that they now carry weapons because others do too, or are looking for a different job because the commutes have become too scary.

Washington State no longer arrests for drug possession, and although I can perceive the intent behind that move, I’m not sure solutions yet exist for a number of its unexpected outcomes. As a security officer told me recently: “as soon as we get on, they stop. As soon as we leave, they start again. There’s nothing we can do!” With the new policy of non-removal on buses being known, Metro is the ideal new venue. And the public is now becoming aware of how badly some people are hurting, and the methods they're resorting to.

I haven’t had this much secondhand smoke stuffed down my throat since my childhood visits to Grandma’s house. But unlike her house, some of our buses don't have windows that open.

2. What's Been Goin' On

Let’s remember that opiate abuse has been in existence for longer than six months. It was always possible to light a cigarette on a bus before last summer; it just didn't happen. My friends working in transitional housing and other social services are not surprised by these newly public behaviors. The difference is there used to be places where they could happen out of sight. Many of those locations are now closed, and the boundaries of the remaining spaces have to accommodate what used to take place behind closed doors. To the parks, libraries and buses we go...

Perhaps it would calm us to remember that street folks are processing trauma as best they can, in a society that doesn't provide  much of a social safety net. They are resentful toward a system of institutions that has rejected and ignored their plight, which pays lip service to "the homelessness crisis" while appearing to glibly pocket your well-meaning taxpayer dollars. Can you blame them for being depressed, tired, at their worst? Are you not also angry? Disappointed?

You, who are infinitely better off than they?

This is the bad time.

My friends on Jackson and Third Avenue reach for the solutions that are available to them. If you are mentally stable, have no addiction challenges or criminal history, and have your paperwork in order, homelessness is merely a stumbling block. With the resources this city has you’d be on your way, no big deal. But heaven help you if you have any of the above four obstacles. Drugs tempt because they seem to fix things– like untreated mental health or unresolved trauma– for now.

Famous last words.

The slope is slippery, but anywhere along it the truth remains. Let’s repeat it: these people are doing their best to process trauma using means easily accessible to them, without a social safety net.

3. The View for Operators

I listen to my operator colleagues bemoan the passengers, sharing their horror stories with me. I listen without trying to change their mind; I have my horror stories too. But I make every attempt to avoid yielding to despair. I do not brag at the base about leaving passengers behind. I do not boast that I don't even open the doors for people, or abandon the schedule and leave all the riders for other bus drivers, as some of my colleagues selfishly do. They are trying to survive, I think, and survival is inherently self-absorbed. It makes you disregard the problems of others.

There has been no new training and precious little acknowledgement from management on the problems we now face, nor an official explanation of why formerly useful resources work differently now. A brief example:

The lack of interdepartmental and interagency communication is so far gone that operators are quite literally unaware of certain resources set aside specifically for them. These days on Aurora Avenue in particular, you’ll often have a KC Sheriff trailing your bus as you drive, just in case anything happens inside your coach. This is a resuscitation of a service I was trained on in 2008. Back then it then was called a ‘trailing escort.’ If something happened on your 358, you stopped your bus and put on your reverse lights, which alerted the officers behind you that something was up. Not only do today’s operators not get that brief training, they do not even know they are being helped. I’ve had five different drivers tell me variations of: “I keep getting tailgated by cops on my route, and I have no idea why!”

The operators around me are mostly new, due to recent workforce turnover, and the team ethos of my former colleagues is absent at the precise time when it's needed most. We have forgotten how to help each other, stick up for each other, recognize we are part of a larger community.

I wonder if my coworkers realize they have something in common with the afflicted users, the unstable and hungry denizens they so fear and struggle with. They, we, us– all feel abandoned. Those street folks are not them– they feel as we do but moreso, we drivers who feel our superiors have left us. We working people at jobs of all kinds who are now asked to do more, risk more, pay more, "figure it out yourself," for less. Does that sound familiar? The folks on Third Avenue, the broken heart of Seattle (as my colleague Yen poetically calls it), feel that abandonment too, but on a deeper and more biting scale.

Humans were never meant to be isolated from each other. The toll this pandemic is taking is as much mental as physical, and no one is unscathed. We are all infected. A light used to burn within us, and it is in danger of going out.

You are better than that.

4. The Problem Is

Pessimism simplifies what you see. It tempts you to believe it. It’s the easy route. So is finding a villain. Your fear will tell you that the solution is to arrest everybody. That’s as much of a band-aid solution as fentanyl is. While addressing matters in the short-term, let’s remember to ask: What are people experiencing such that they search for these coping mechanisms in the first place? What basic needs could be addressed, that aren’t? When mental health, housing, and medication access are available, other problems tend to diminish on their own. You stop needing the coping mechanisms. Fentanyl seems like it’s the problem. It isn’t. Vandalism, vagrancy, burglary, assault– aren’t the problem.

It would be so nice if they were. That would be so easy.

Last week I listened to another driver as I scarfed down lunch at the base. He’s one of the great ones, and I learn from his charitable views. He was sharing a moment on his bus which stopped his heart. A young man with a cart of belongings was talking to him on his 60. “No one cares," the kid had told him. "I want to move forward. I’m ready. But no one will help. No one cares about us. They leave us out here like this, every night.” My operator friend could do nothing but sympathize, and watch as the boy deboarded and walked off into the black evening, empty-hearted and catastrophically alone.

Most of us are sad. All of us are lonely. When morale is low, you the driver take it out on the passengers. When morale is low, you the youngster light up another one.

The problem that needs to be addressed is the sensation that people believe they are on their own.

5. Where I'm Coming From

I do not write these words from a place of distaste for the people. I like the people. I love the people; you know that. The sweetest man on my trip last night was a young fellow of the trademark ash-stained hands, with foil, torch and straw in hand. He was having a hard time putting his bike on the rack while also holding onto his paraphernalia. I stepped out to join him, helping him lift his bike and securing the handle.
“Hey, how’s it goin’. I can help.”
“Aw thanks dude! I really appreciate that.”
“For sure, no worries. Hey man I just gotta ask, could you put the foil away for the bus ride?”
“Oh yeah man, yeah no problem. Of course.”

And he did. There are good people everywhere. I am especially grateful to the brazen passengers who take matters into their own hands to help the crowd at large; more than once I’ve been saved by such courageous souls. Unlike me, my superiors, police, security or any other authority figure in King County, they have the unique ability to remove, by force, a passenger doing the above-mentioned activites. It’s an unfortunate truth that that is sometimes necessary.

Nor do I write from a place of anger with Metro management. I’m on friendly terms with many of those folks, on up to County Executive, and I’m not qualified to evaluate their performance from my bus-driving armchair. There are politicians here I like and respect, including some who have reached out to me personally and who bend over backwards fighting the good fight. There are police(wo)men I personally know and appreciate. As ever, the problem is not individual. John Steinbeck spelled it out for us 83 years ago, and it’s still true today: it’s the System. These officials, like me, like my using passenger friends, like my dispirited colleagues, are ordinary (and understaffed!) people under extraordinary circumstances. I’ll admit I do wish our top management came around to the bases more often like the last two administrations did, because nothing brings people together like, well, coming together in person. But hey, maybe there’s a pandemic happening.

I write rather from a place of disappointment. Fentanyl and the other misbehaviors I mention above are primarily a draw for young people– my generation and the new one under it (I’m not getting a lot of beef from the old-timers). I am excited about the prospects of young people. Sure, they’re obsessed with technology and not very good at talking to others, but they have their qualities, don't they? They were so good at caring about many promising things– equality of all stripes, the environment, innovation. The nice thing about Fentanyl is that its high makes one docile. The problem is that it’s unbelievably good at killing people. And I’d prefer not to see my own generation wipe itself out before the pandemic is over.

Go easy on yourself. On others. It isn’t only you who is suffering. You will make it through the night.

I’ll be out there, waving at ya.

6. Low-Cost Suggestions for the Short Term

For those in positions of power who read this blog:

• Incidents on buses like the ones mentioned above happen disproportionately in concurrence with rear-door boarding. You get something from face-to-face contact that you can’t get any other way. Consider pausing the 3rd Avenue all-door boarding rule, as there’s no need to expedite boarding right now. Safety and community take precedence.
• Communicate with frontline staff in a visible manner that performs equalization of bureaucratic hierarchies. It is worth the effort. A happier workforce, one that feels heard and cared for, performs quantifiably better.
• Statistics show us that playing classical music in public spaces reduces crime as well as physical and verbal harassment by significant margins. What would happen if the crew at 3rd and Pike (which now houses the old 12th & Jackson crowd after the recent 12th Ave cleanup) had to listen to Fur Elise and the Brandenburg Concertos 24/7? I promise I’m not just saying this because I like classical music…
• Let’s be mindful of what southbound 3rd and James has taught us: moving zones across the street doesn’t solve anything. It merely brings everyone across the street.
• In the tradition of building skateparks, consider offering a venue, even if obliquely, following the model Vancouver, BC has established. Food for thought: this is the purpose the Jungle performed in Seattle from the 1930s to the 2010s.
  
• At the very least: let's lose the "it's a great day to ride Metro" PSA, and fast. I know it wasn't meant to sound tone-deaf, but in these new conditions it sends exactly the wrong message about organizational oversight.

For everyone else:

• Let's try to look after each other this season. We are the help we can provide. Be aware of your surroundings and consider the needs of those around you. In the community you have access to, try make people feel less alone.

I should’ve pulled in closer, I reflected, as I surveyed the distance between the open front doors and the curb. An elderly woman was trying to lift her walker up to the lip of the bus’s step. Stiff in her movements, cautious, the tentative attitude your gestures carry when you know the pain of a previous fall. I stepped out from behind my driver shield.

“Lemme help you out,” I said. I lifted the front end of her walker up and we made it inside. As she stood later, preparing to deboard, I offered to help once again. We shuffled out through the entranceway together.
“Here, grab my arm if you want,” I said, offering her my elbow.

She grabbed my hand. I held her fingers tightly with my own. We bridged the gap between bus and curb as a single united four-legged friendly wheeling beast. She continued telling me about her daughters, her plans, her itinerary for the night. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, listening. I wasn’t ready to go just yet. It had felt so good to be touched.

Do you know what I mean?

When was the last time I had shaken a stranger's hand? The gesture had had no meaning attached to it. It was just a utilitarian moment of… wait a second. It did have meaning. Helping another always has meaning. Acknowledging another. Implying respect, acceptance; these are the seeds of how we let another person know they are loved. Say it with your actions, your eyes and patience:

You belong here too.

That is what we can do during this unpleasant time. Embrace, in what ways we can. Convey to those around us that we care. We stare at our phones with desperation, trying hopelessly to hide from what we know is true: this all feels terribly lonesome. We are the social animal, and we derive joy and worth from interaction. Belonging, community, love: those have been stolen from us, restricted and suppressed, with an overlay of fear and very real death to boot. The tools we would normally use to navigate fear and death– which mostly have to do with belonging among other people, including strangers– have themselves been snatched out of our grasp.

Do not hide from this awful sensation.

Do not reach for petty distractions. News will not help. This is an emotional problem, separate from the other problems, and the antidote to despair is never reason. Feel it. Feel it, so you can then feel your way past it. In time you will see the people around you are as lonely as you are. They ache. They are not at their best. You are becoming okay with that, recognizing they are ordinary and flawed people under extraordinary circumstances, no longer in between history but caught in the thick of it. I believe it would help if they felt like they were part of something. Acknowledged.

Which is where we come in.

Saying hello to the person on the sidewalk. Thanking this or that employee for coming in to work. Being patient. Putting our phone and earbuds away, and connecting with the real world again. With strangers. These are the things our citymates so badly need, and it is what we as individuals can offer– for others, and by extension, ourselves. For now we'll give without expecting much in return. It's the giving that brings us up. We're doing this for them.

These are our people.

If it feels safe to do so, try offering this. You cannot imagine the good you are achieving with these sorts of gestures. You have an opportunity to make others feel less lonely. You know, by now, what that loneliness feels like. You know the urgency.

If it does not feel safe to do so– well, that is the subject of my next post!

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.

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Stay tuned for the countdown!