Dec 13 2008
“You don’t see that very often”
Those words I heard as I was hauling myself and my seventeen month old daughter off the bus. We were on our way to a birthday party for a one year old boy named Samuel and a man had entered the bus and struck up a conversation with us. Of course, this being Chicago on a Saturday leading up to Christmas, a lot of people got on and off the bus during our three-mile tour. But the little observant lady found no one willing to make eye contact with her or address her on the bus until late in the journey when this man did. By then, we were getting close to our destination and the bus was getting closer to its final destination.
I appreciate public transportation for a lot of reasons. Obviously, a large segment of the population (us included) can’t afford to have/keep a car, congestion of a massive group of people trying to get to a few spaces in a very time-specific manner in separate vehicles would destroy our infrastructure and cause everyone to be late, wastes preportionately less gas, etc., etc. But it also forces us to face the cold, hard reality of a shared space. That shared space rarely turns into something that I (nor any sane person) would call community, but at least we become aware that we are not alone nor left to our own devices (well, except for that jerk on Western Ave who thought that somehow me sitting down on the bench next to him on a CROWDED bus would give him a right to voice his Euro-trash homophobia as if I somehow offended him). So, every once in a while, it’s good for a hardened Chicagoan like myself to run into another Chicagoan who is cool with just striking up a convo about kids on the bus. Every once in a while, it’s nice to lower the old guard down.
And, I must admit, there was a bit of pride in me when we walked out into the December rain and I realized that it was another man - who had entered the bus within the last two minutes and sat next to Joss, who she had also looked up to as if to strike her own muted conversation - that said something to the first guy about me and my daughter. I could practically feel him point with a bit of pride himself at the odd sight of a full-grown man holding preciously to his pint-sized princess. “That’s something you don’t see every day.” Being here all my life, seeing so many fathers abandon their children, knowing so many of the children who were abandoned, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And I felt extra good about my special relationship with my special baby.
It wasn’t until now that I realized that these brief encounters in these shared spaces could also be described so succinctly and warmly.
<3