Being sans car for a few days (I get it tomorrow), I spent today doing errands on public transit: train twice, bus thrice. Nice to connect with downtown again. “Don’t ever get a car,” I used to tell people, “for now I have lost touch with downtown.”
On the electric train I admired the new vast car: Not a “commuter train” like in that movie Source Code going between two US cities, no, our “light rail transit” is all within city limits. There were seats at the ends; mid-car I stood against a horizontal orange bar, between two standing ladies. Across the floor a man stood with a furled umbrella, red and blue stripes. Environment Canada said it would sprinkle this afternoon. My own “umbrella” was stuffed into my pack at my feet: a rainproof down jacket, which I had to put on early and late in the day.
The old digital streamer by the windows still announces the next station. New to me were the periodic curb-shaped screens hanging from the ceiling. They showed a map with a moving dot between stations. Cool!
To get to the downtown train platform, I first stood for a bus along the highway out of town, amongst dusty grass. I had forgotten the smell of hydrocarbons, a bearable smell for a grown boy who liked machines. I had forgotten the periodic noise as trucks slowed for the traffic signal, a sound that sometimes drowned out the voice on my flip phone. Riding the bus, I enjoyed the periodic steel clicks and groans, and all the while there was the familiar drone of something or other: the transmission, I presume.
Some folks are less comfortable. I pity the businessman riding for his first time, the only suit on the bus, stepping gingerly down down the aisle, wondering whom to sit beside, as behind him his coins “clink, gling, chank, chunk” down the machine. Besides business people, our city includes fine civil servant technicians who know software. In cities all over the world, people hop on and tap their bank card, or a transit card. In London it’s an oyster card. Not here. Our techs tried to build their tech from scratch, too proud or something to call their opposite numbers in London or Singapore… they gave up. Hence we use coins and paper. At least there is some sort of app to be downloaded onto a smart phone, and tapped beside the coin machine, but I never saw anybody using it.
I hope nobody feels bad about “taking the bus,” such as the long haired general labourer in the ball cap. I imagine him standing next to a graduate student. Hypothetically I ask, which one rides a fancy bicycle and which one “has wheels?” I think the campus guy bikes. My reasoning is this: We all want a sense of power: the one has power from driving, the other feels the power of gaining knowledge.
Bus drivers have a nice gig. Folks seated up front may talk to them, and across the aisle to each other. I talked a bit myself, both when I got on and needed advice, and later from the sidewalk to say something nice. Next day when I boarded, he asked how my trip had gone.
It was the poet A.E. Houseman who wrote of making eye contact, for one second, with a soldier in a file marching down the street, writing, “Soldier I wish you well.” For my part, as a “lonely senior citizen,” I could, like a young man dreadfully unemployed, feel like a billiard ball unconnected to the other billiard balls on the bus. But no, because, being active, I feel “I am paying my way on the human scene.” The bus holds neighbours I may never see again. I wish them well.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
March
2026
From A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXII
The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread,
And out we troop to see:
A single redcoat turns his head,
He turns and looks at me.
…
My man, from sky to sky’s so far,
We never crossed before;
Such leagues apart the world’s ends are,
We’re like to meet no more;
…
What thoughts at heart have you and I
We cannot stop to tell;
But dead or living, drunk or dry,
Soldier, I wish you well.
