BUS STORY # 298 ("We Will")

Northbound Yale Bus and Smith's, a photo by busboy4 on Flickr.

We’re picking up the after-dinner crowd from Project Share. I always see a mix of new faces and old familiar ones, but everybody boarding always seems to know everybody else.

This evening, there’s a couple I haven’t seen before. I don’t realize they’re a couple until she sits in his lap when there aren’t any seats nearby. He makes a show of how heavy she is, but they are both having fun. The guy across the aisle gallantly offers her his seat, and she takes it.

I’m guessing they’re in their late 40s-early 50s, but they are wearing the patina of the street, and may look older than they really are. He’s in jeans and a flannel shirt jacket. She’s wearing her blonde hair in a pony tail.

After she moves across the aisle to her own seat, she calls out what a wonderful dinner they’ve just had. She repeats, a wonderful dinner, then adds, thank you Jesus.

She doesn’t get any amens, but she happily plunges into the hubbub of conversation filling the bus.

A short while later, we are approaching the Smiths at the corner of Yale and Coal.

She points out the window and says that’s where they used to live, about four blocks east of Smiths. She remembers one snowy evening she and her husband were pushing a grocery cart full of groceries back to their apartment.

Her husband takes over the story. They were pushing that cart down the street, down a tire track pathway made in the snow by passing cars. They had four hundred dollars worth of groceries in that cart. There was ice under the snow, and it was slow going. And every time they heard a car coming, they had to quick get the cart and themselves into the snow by the side of the street.

She adds, it took them two hours to get home that night.

Four hundred dollars worth of groceries in that cart, he says.

We had a freezer back then, she says. And then she adds, half to him, half to us, "Don’t worry, we’ll get back to where we were. We will."