Here are two figures running for my bus now, tumbling out of the American darkness. They are a man and a woman of proximate age running together, held down by their gear, a motley assortment of blankets and bags. Right now they're in between stops, and I have a moment of hesitation; perhaps I should leave them, as the 7 is still running frequently at this time of night. There will be another one before too long.

But then I looked again at the man, who'd been waving to me, signaling his desire for the bus while trying to retain everything he was carrying. His T-shirt was white, and his arm was dark brown– black in this light– and he put his hand over his heart in a gesture of entreaty, appealing to my better angels. The contrast of his arm and shirt made for a clear visual, cutting through the evening haze.

I smiled and pulled over. They could see my smile, as I drive with my dome light on (people are nicer to you when they can see you). Catching their breath, stepping up the stairs, making sure they have everything, thanking me profusely all the while. 

After they were seated I turned and said, "it was the hand on the heart that did it for me."
"Right on," he grinned. "Nice," she breathed, still winding down. 
"It was no way I could turn that down!"

We chatted a little further, but the glow of his gesture and our initial exchange were what held. I was reminded of an old memory at Rainier and Henderson. I'd been standing by the farebox reading, with the doors wide open, when a middle-aged man came up asking for two transfers. 

I was irritated by his entitled attitude (this was long before I'd arrived at the thoughts in the two posts preceding this one and the recent writeup on homeless laziness). I knew better than to refuse him while standing alone in the 'hood, knowing I'd be in the exact same place again tomorrow and the next day, and the day after. But as I tore two transfers to hand to him, I blurted out against my better judgment: "what do you got for me, man? I'm helpin' you out, happy to do so, but what d'you got for me?"

Without missing a beat he replied, "I got love for you, brother! I got nothin' but love!"
I paused and smiled. The quote, humbly glancing through my brain: Every man is my superior, in that I may learn from him. I said, "you know, that's beautiful! I like that, thank you!"
"Nothin' but peace and love, my brotha!"

What else is there, really, at the end of the day? What more could you possibly ask for? 

Nothing, that's what. 

The night was silent. We ambled forward together, a mobile living room, lightly populated with benevolent strangers. Nothing but the gentle hum of the bus's electric current. People sitting alone, nursing their own thoughts.

Then out of the silence, like cymbals crashing after a mellow adagio, I hear an ear-splitting stentorian roar:

[This story is now in my new book!]

To my fellow humans the terrorists,

Before you pull your next trigger, I would ask for a pause, not for my sake but yours: take in a full breath, and think of the smile on your mother's face. Think of the early times, when your parents were young, when sunsets lasted longer, when the biggest problem was schoolwork, acceptance from friends, or the hesitant expression on a pretty girl's face.

Think of the taste of bread.

Consider your goals now, and reflect on how they're all ultimately to do with loneliness, the search for belonging and respect and when we really get down to it, love.

Know that I was all of those things too. My goals and memories are like yours, and as children we would've played together. The weight between your shoulders is one I can feel, different but familiar, a lack of love to be solved not with hate, but with love. We are all bitter over something. Let us not fight rigid ideologies with other rigid ideologies, or address violence and mayhem with the tools of violence and mayhem. In the business of fighting ideas, there is only one successful method: other ideas.

The great battles of the twenty-first century will be intellectual battles. War is simplistic, and blinds with tragedy; it traffics more than perhaps anything else in nostalgia, and is outmoded and archaic as a problem-solving format. You are so much better than this, my friend. I am disappointed in you. You knew the face of goodness, once. 

​I do not think you have completely forgotten how to see. 

-Nathan Vass

​As you know, I was present during last year's attacks in Paris. It hasn't felt right to share these photographs until now. Now it feels wrong not to share them. 

Click here for the galleries. 

I'd never seen her at Fifth and Jackson before. Rose's squat profile was instantly recognizable, her silver hair backlit by the storefronts opposite. 

"Hey, Rose," I said, looking down through the gloom at her stroller.
"Hey, Nate," she replied, hobbling a step forward. Quickly, knowing I've turned her away before (read here and here for the backstory on this), she said, "I got a new stroller but it has broke wheels too."
She may not have been able to see my face in the darkness from out there, but I smiled with my voice. "That's okay, thanks for getting a new one. That's what counts."
"It still has a problem."
"That's okay."

Rose stepped in keeping pace with the glaciers of old, cursing the nerve pain which shot through her swollen legs at each step. Glaciers with nerve pain would move slowly. She still demanded the front seats be lifted in a particular fashion I can never remember. I really ought to write it down. Tonight a young male passenger– don't say the youth never help their elders!– helped her out for me.

I couldn't see her as we carried on our way, but could hear her just behind me. Snatches of another life drifted within earshot; I strained for the details. She was ready to go home, she sighed. "I got up at 4am… 'cause when people are in pain they make a lot of noise. He's been in a lot of pain." She kept saying "he," and I never got an answer on who he was; only that he was a vet, and someone special. I said that's a hard life, being a vet, and she didn't disagree. He was going in for surgery, she said, he went in for surgery, but he's okay now.
"I'm glad he's okay."
"I'm gonna take care of him," she remarked. "He's not gonna do anything to me." 
"That's good."

The silences, the barest sentences, and the lifetimes behind them.

"You can sit down! It's safer to sit down!" she hollered at an Asian man, trying to be nice. Genuine negativity is contagious, but so too is genuine positivity. I caught a glimpse of her craggy face in the mirror, her grey-blue eyes still blazing in late age. I'm sure she fit most people's definition of pretty at some point in her life. Does she reflect on her past, as I do, when the pain is not as strong? Sleepless in the wee morning hours, lying in repose, a reverie between the ceiling and ourselves. I hope there are good memories. It's a solitary act, and something we all share. 

"Getting operated on…" she was saying something about medical procedures. Then a thought on housing, how they're gonna tear her house down, putting up condos instead; I can understand that frustration. "They need to be more kind to me." Her grumbles mingled with the gentle hum of the electric bus. Then I heard her, and I heard her again. She said it more than once: "everybody just needs to be loved." 

We Americans are a vocal sort. We wear our emotions, our opinions, fear, anger, ignorance– loudly, on our sleeves. But there are things even we don't bray out to the world. 

I believe loneliness is the premier element of the human condition. No other state of being is experienced as pervasively. It doesn't matter how popular you are. We are individuals, and we process things away from others, deep within our own minds, and that is always and ever a singular act; how many millions of thoughts will you never share with anyone, because they were too esoteric, inconsequential, hard to contextualize, or private? We brush our teeth, tie our shoes, and hang up our clothes alone. We crave acceptance and love, or at least acknowledgment, from others in an effort to combat it. It's not quite up there with the fact of death, as the motivating engine for all human action, but it's close.

But we don't ever talk about it. 

We wax and whirl about the subject, and because the condition is universal, we understand each other anyway. We talk about relationships, goals, psychology, and desire, but we never discuss it bluntly in relation to ourselves. "Everybody needs to be loved" is a valid statement on its own, but it's also code for something else, something deeper and more personal. I heard it in her plaintive voice. I know that feeling too.

As she left: "Nate, I'm glad I got to see you tonight." She apologized she couldn't ride further, and explained that she really did need to go home. She took forever. That's fine, I said. Then she hollered into the wind, her cry reaching through the closing the doors, me turning the wheel out to pull back into traffic. She was yelling more nice things. So nice, perhaps it's good I didn't hear them.

Some days later she was at the Andover Street bus stop. She was surrounded amongst her things in the bus shelter, camped out for an afternoon siesta of sorts. She didn't want the bus, but waved her hands upon recognizing me. She called out, repeatedly, until she knew I heard her: "thank you Nathan, thank you! Thank you, Nathan!" 

[This story is now available in my new book!]

"So you make a left on uh, Forty-Fifth?"

We work out the details. He wanted to go further than my route could take him, and I apologized in mock agony, throwing my hands in the air. He laughed.

There's a texture to small talk I find valuable. The placeholder words, the repetition, the way ideas come forth haltingly, together. The great speeches of our time will exist in perpetuity, as will the eloquent or fiery dialogues of film art and literature; but what of the mundane, the banal and comfortable normalcy of the everyday exchange? Who is writing those down? I am, that's who. Our banter continued a bit before growing into meaningfulness, but I include it all so our histories don't just contain the anomalies of life, but the workaday moments too. 

He was crisp and casual all at once, an educated man in his thirties wearing a collared button-up and jeans, neatly combed dark hair parted on one side. I couldn't place his accent. I said, 

"How are you today?"
"Not bad. Tired and,"
"Yeah. Time to go home?"
"Sleep-deprived and all this thing. I had to like uh, sort of entertain a friend who is visiting Seattle? And lots of things to do,"
"Okay running around, going everywhere,"
"Yeah walking around, Downtown and Cap Hill,"
"That's nice of you. Today's a perfect day to show people the city."
"It was nice. It was nice. She had a good time."
"Had she been to Seattle before?"
"No."
"Cool. You got to be, anytime she thinks of Seattle, she will also think of you, you know?"
"That's a good thing!" He reflected, and then asked, "how is the night for you?"
"Great. It's really good, yeah. I like this job."
"Yeah."
"It's fun, you know? Talking to people, for eight hours…!"
"I always wish, I'm sort of an office person sitting in the office all day, and I always wish I had a job that like… a little interaction, something, I don't know!"
"It gives me life, you know? It gives me energy, the people. Something different every day. This is my corner office!"
"Ha!"
"But yeah, very satisfying to get to talk to people, or help people, or listen…"
"Every person has something to, like, not that their story is especially important or useful, but when you look at yourself through them, you learn something."
"Exactly."
"About yourself."
"Yeah! It makes me a better person you know, there's so much to think about. And when you're driving there's lots of time to think!"
"Haha, yeah."
"What sort of office work you do?"
"I do research!"
"Excellent Like in a lab–"
"Mathematics."
"Cool. I like the binary quality of math, very clean."
"Exactly. You know something is correct– or not."

On that note he bid me farewell. I smiled to myself, alone in an empty bus now, and went back to thinking. There is indeed solace to be found in math, for modern life is such a sea of grey areas. In adolescence we learn there are no easy answers; in adulthood we discover there are questions which simply have no answers. There is peace to be found though, and a measure of understanding. It occurred to me he'd hit the nail on the head with respect to the point of this blog.

Today marks for four-year anniversary of The View From Nathan's Bus. The stories I share here are not simply to point out that which is bizarre or humorous; nor merely to offer entertainment to transit enthusiasts, or documentation of everyday conversation for linguists, or to explore the world of customer service, highlight issues of social justice and urban living, celebrate interactions between strangers, or offer an armchair window at ground level into the city's crazy central vortex. Nor even is its sole purpose to offer enlightenment on misunderstood lives, to celebrate the worth and vivacious color of marginalized peoples. Nor too is it only a reminder of all the good, the beautiful positive moments which take place daily everywhere, a reminder for we who live in a culture doing its best to have us focus only on the negative.

I hope the blog performs all of the above functions to a degree. But at its core, it is something more. True stories add context to our conception of life and personhood. As our friend said above, we learn about ourselves by hearing these stories. We are the real subject here.

Every one of us is going through this journey of life for the first time. Til our last breath we are learning how to think, gazing out and upward as children, reflecting. If we can learn a bit about ourselves and those around us by reading this blog, and perhaps feel a little better along the way, it will have achieved its purpose. Thank you for reading, and for making this a bigger enterprise than I ever could've dreamed of.

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