Bus. Fair.

It’s been three days now since my car has been in the body shop recuperating from a front-end “kiss” she received last fall in St. Ignace, when a mid-1980s red Chevy van – driven by someone still wily from the Wild Turkey bath he took the night before – “didn’t see” my Prelude behind him when he backed-out to leave the remote cabin on the Lake Michigan shore.

The van did have mirrors, but I doubt the poor chap’s eyes were doing him much good, especially after the mid-morning nips he took to take the edge off, a tactic that actually sent him even further off “the cliff.” As he pulled away, I felt bad for his lady passenger and all the drivers on U.S.-2 that sunny morning.

Now, because of my procrastination, my car had been enduring this black eye for months. But on Monday, I took her in because I didn’t want to see her sad anymore. Oh, and Mr. Turkey’s insurance company was starting to hound me.

And the weird thing is, I kinda hope she dies on the operating table.

You see, we take our cars for granted. When you have one, you don’t really realize you own a vehicle. Driving is kind of like pissing. You do it every day, but don’t really remember the particulars of any one session. It just kind of happens.

Not having a car – or more specifically, having a car and then losing it for a while – can throw things a bit out of whack. And for me, that shift happened, and I like it a lot.

But of all the benefits of not having a vehicle at your disposal – the added exercise, no carbon emissions, no irresponsible trips to IHOP at 3:30 a.m. and through a “DUI enforcement zone” – the best is having to use public transportation.

Kalamazoo is no metropolis. There is no need for rail, or light rail or rickshaws. In the winter, I sometimes wish I had eight huskies and a sled, but like many cities of about 100,000, we have buses, and I boarded one today for the first time in years. I felt like a kid when I put my $1.35 in the cash collector and took my seat. I’ve ridden on subways, buses and trains all over the country and in Europe, but there is something about riding the bus in your own city when you rarely ride it at all. You feel like a stranger in your own town.

I was on my way back to downtown from an errand trip when I saw the bus turn the corner and come to a stop before me. I stepped inside and met eyes with the driver, a large black woman with arms that looked like droopy hams.

“You need a transfer?” she asked me.

“Uh, no,” I replied.

“Then go sit down,” she said.

The ride was only about 5 minutes, but I took in so much. It was like my eyes were at a buffet and they just got voted off Survivor.

There was a little boy, maybe two years old, his skin the color of creamed coffee, looking out the window as the world flew by. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a black New York Yankees baseball cap too big for his head, its bill perfectly straight. His hair fell out of the sides of the hat like little springs.

We glanced at each other.

“Hi,” he said, and I said “hi” back, smiling.

Then again, and again, as relentless kids do, we said “hi” to each other.

I shut my eyes.

“Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi,” he said in a sweet voice that reminded me of a kitten. Soft and innocent.

His mother picked him up and held him in her lap, never breaking her conversation with the bus driver.

“I think I’m going to Chicago in a little bit and then maybe move there then get out, go someplace else,” the mother said.

“How ‘bout Africa,” the driver replied.

Sitting calmly across from the mother was an old woman in a red electric wheelchair. The chair was strapped to the floor with four, heavy-gauge straps that looked like seatbelts on steroids. She had large, meaty ears that looked like marshmallows.

She was dressed all in yellow – yellow coat, shirt, pants, shoes. Her hair was done up and she’d put little purple hair clips the shape of butterflies all around the top of her head, like a crown. I thought that a girl of 5 or 7 or maybe 10 would do the same thing and I smiled as genuine a smile as I have in days.

Every 30 seconds or so, she’d take a sip from a huge cup of frozen coke, holding it delicately with her left hand. Her index finger was wrapped in dirty gauze, but that wasn’t what made her hand noticeable. No, that was the nearly neon green nail polish on each fingernail.

I don’t know where she was going, maybe a doctor’s visit, maybe a friend’s house, but she oozed confidence and peacefulness and I felt like I knew her.

In the rear of the bus, four young black men sat silently, each one looking out the window with a blank stare. One in particular – the kid wearing the earmuff-sized headphones and an orange t-shirt that read: “I have multiple personalities and none of them likes you” – caught my eye.

He looked young but seemed old and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was the look he had, the face that he was showing: tight lips, eyes too intense for someone with no lines stretching from their outer edges – at least not yet. I wondered where he was off to as well, but more than that, where he’d been.

We pulled into the bus station. The boys in back got out quickly and scattered. I stayed on for a few moments.

The driver got out of her seat – slowly – using her hands to lift her legs out of the cubby-hole area beneath the steering wheel.

“Hi, baby,” she said to the little boy. He waved back like little kids do, opening and closing his hand.

“When does the Portage No. 2 come?” the old lady asked.

“Half an hour,” the driver said.

Then she bent over and began to the release the straps from the wheelchair, exhaling as she reached for the straps’ ends.

“Lord have mercy,” she said. “Lord have mercy.”