A young man enters, the height of hipsterdom.  He’s attractive in a shallow, meaningless way. A few commuters behind him is a shy-looking but pretty teenage girl in a bulky sweatshirt and yoga pants.  She sits in front of me and I watch her eyes follow the hipster as he passes me.  She immediately pulls out her cell phone to text someone.  I assume it’s about the boy…at that age, most things are.

An old man steps onto the now very crowded bus, faded Levi’s, button down shirt, brown Members Only-type jacket.  His cognac colored fedora covers his hair but it must be grey (if he has any), same as his neatly trimmed beard.  He asks the bus driver a question I can’t hear, but the answer was apparently satisfactory. He has a cane in one hand, with the price sticker still stuck to the shaft.  As he steps toward the crowded seats, he looks confused and a thirtyish woman who had been gossiping with a friend jumps out of her seat and offers it to him.  I’m touched by her gesture and I think, ‘He looks like Indiana Jones’ great uncle who wandered out of the Home’.

Sitting across from him is a monstrous woman, a mountain unto herself; shoulder-length graying dishwater hair pulled back into a lazy pony tail.  She has a knee brace on one tree-trunk leg; her legs are splayed apart onto the floor as if she is a weight lifter, feet in worn sandals, toes neglected.  She holds a pink cell phone up to her ear, but I never hear or see her speak.  She seems to only be listening…but to what?  In her other hand is another cell phone, this one tiny and black.  She holds them both in one paw, glaring at them, then listens to the pink one again.  What is so important?

At the last stop before the freeway, a man enters.  He’s black, about 35, wearing a royal blue football shirt with the #1 emblazoned in bright yellow.  His basketball shorts are a strange powder blue, long and past his knees, and he wears his athletic socks pulled all the way up so that no leg can be seen.  He has a black do-rag on, and I keep thinking there might be a pony tail at the back but I’m not positive. He has a large duffel bag that he places on the floor as he decides to stand for the rest of the ride.  I look back at him a few moments later and notice he has placed his hands through the loops provided for safety in such a way that it looks like he’s shackled there, at the front of the bus.  I wish I could draw, or paint, or somehow unobtrusively take his photo in order to capture that moment, but it’s not to be.  I wonder, what is he prisoner to?  Mass transit?  Cultural mores? Fitness?