The bus eases onto Route 1 north, cruising the curb in search of riders then gliding into the left lane to turn onto Main Street, then left again onto southbound Route 1, aka Second Street. In front of the abandoned plumbing supply store is a middle-aged, paunchy, sandy-haired man in bermuda shorts and shades holding aloft a hand-lettered sign saying "Thank you Police Officers."

Confronting rush-hour traffic, peering into the bus looking to make eye contact with each and every one of us, he's shoving his message out there.

What's happened in my neighborhood?

The bus turns onto Montgomery Avenue and I pull the cord for the next stop. As I do every working day, I get off at Fourth and Montgomery, seven and a half blocks from my house, so I can walk through the neighborhood, seeing who's about and what's what.

There's that pugnacious little dog, RUNNING to accost me, barking ferociously (or so he thinks) and dogging me along the boundaries of his property. There is no fence, no electronic device around his neck to shock him  if he steps beyond his jurisdiction. His property is a large corner lot, usually hosting a cadre of teenagers playing basketball. You can see the furry little tyke wavering between his sacred responsibility to guard the perimeter and his secret desire to join in the basketball game.

As I walk on  pondering that guy's sign, I remember a voicemail message we got Monday morning from the city's emergency hotline. An eleven-year-old boy had been waiting for his schoolbus alone on the first day of school when a dirty white van pulled up alongside him. One of the two men in the van, whose description we are given in amazing detail, beckoned to the kid while holding out a toy motorcyle. The boy, surely acting on at least ten years of training by his parents and teachers on the perils of strangers bearing gifts, refused to even look at the men in the van. When one of the men got out of the van and began to approach the boy, shaking the motorcycle enticingly (or so he thought), the boy turned on his heels and RUNS. The creep holding the toy froze in his tracks. Well done, Mom. Booya, Dad. Fucking-A, little kid.

The cops, who I know had some help from neighbors, must have caught those monsters.

Up ahead of me, I see the blonde, lanky, youngish landscaper weed-whacking the sidewalk in front of the insurance agent's office fronting on Talbott Street. Without looking up, he retreats with his noisy apparatus deep into the yard as I approach.  We never make eye contact. But we are certainly aware of each other. 
 
For the last four years, every September, after agreeing to renew our alliance for another year, Bob and I head west, hang a left at Route 81, and plunge up the Shenandoah Valley—up, in Blue Ridge terms, being south—following more or less the same path through the Blue Ridge Mountains that Stonewall Jackson did, repeatedly, worrying Abraham Lincoln nearly to death. We flew past cows and Cracker Barrels and big rigs. This time as every time, I scrutinized the cows that lay on the ground, trying to verify what I was once told, that cows always lie on a north–south plane. Once again, I can neither confirm nor deny.

After splitting three two-hour shifts, we arrive at the City of Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee—the city straddles the border, with the middle of State Street marking the state line—this year hosting its 11th annual Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion. The Reunion is a music festival celebrating the city’s roots as The Birthplace of Country Music and the city’s triumphant present as an arbiter of contemporary music, of contemporary musicians and the many genres of today’s American folk music. The City of Bristol has decided not to go softly into that night, as so many Appalachian towns have done. Believe in Bristol, they say. I do.

Shortly after checking in to the Courtyard Marriott, we go out and wait for the shuttle to the Reunion. The shuttle’s late, as it seems to be the first night of every Reunion.  Finally, the yellow school bus arrives and we climb on board. Bob and I are pleased to discover that our bus driver is Joan. Joan is sixty-eight and quietly elegant. Soft voice, beautiful mountain accent. You must listen very closely to hear Joan’s story.

Our bus is a middle-school bus; the men bow slightly to traverse the aisle. The passengers, all from our hotel and from the Holiday Inn next door, are merry and bright. Bob and I remember our driver from previous Bristol Reunions. Joan is animated, graceful, indulging ever so discreetly in music gossip. The last stragglers boarding the bus at our hotel find that all the seats are occupied. One guy climbing aboard sees the full busload and says to Joan, “Can I sit on your lap?” “Oh Lord,” Joan replies, rolling her eyes. She doesn’t want to drive off with anyone standing in the aisle. She looks back in the big convex mirror and says, Can y’all just one-cheek it?  Merriment ensues as cheek-sized space is found on a few seats. Joan is lovely, and our lives are in her hands, and we all want to know about her. 

Some really old guy came on to her the night before, she tells us, feigning horror. How did this come up? I don’t know. The passengers coax her on; they want to know the whole story. She tells.

The guy must have been eighty-nine, she says. He was waiting for her outside the bus when she returned from her fifteen-minute break, and he asked her out. She turned him down. He said something to her, we didn’t catch what it was. She declined again, with grace, I’m sure. Everyone on the bus laughs. Joan says, He was too old…almost ninety!  We are so happy with our beautiful bus driver.

The festival is, as always, wonderful. The thing about Bristol is that you often arrive there not knowing more than a few of the scheduled bands and performers, but you’re open to suggestion and you usually come away with a stack of CDs and at least two or three new passions. This year, our new passions are Dale Watson and the Lone Stars, Shotgun Party, a Cajun couple who dance like heat lightnin’ at the Red Stick Ramblers set, and a hard-working fiddler busking on State Street. Some old familiar favorites are the Quebe Sisters, Justin Townes Earle, Stacy Earle and Mark Stuart, and a former Hackensaw Boys fiddler now with the Black Lillies. We stop in to visit and conduct commerce with our favorite American letterpress shop, YeeHaw Industries, in a tent on the Tennessee side of State Street. We drink, oh, one or two beers in the State Line, Borderline Billiards, et cetera. Bob takes pictures of the old twentieth-century mountain town buildings. Several of the businesses on State Street have been there for a hundred years. 
 
About eight or ten years ago, before we’d ever heard of Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion, we stopped in Bristol on the way home from Nashville,  looking for the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, celebrating the earliest
recordings—at a hotel in Bristol—of the Carter family and Jimmie Rodgers, who became the best-selling artists of their era. Our directions took us to a faded shopping center off the interstate, on the outskirts of town. The museum was closed. 

Now, during the Rhythm & Roots Reunion, Bristol is vibrant, happy, friendly, full of civic pride, love of place, and the sheer determination that the citizens and politicians of Bristol put forth to bring to fruition this annual reunion of music-loving people and the townsfolk who open their streets to artists of every genre. From inside the temporary fence delineating the front patio and outer legal limits of a bar on State Street, we watch the friendly cops and ragtag musicians and old hippies and buskers and race track girls and kids swarming past and I say to myself, Hurrah Bristol! 
 
The last day of the festival, Sunday, we check out of the hotel, leave our car in the parking lot, and hop the school bus into town. Joan is smiling as we board; the passengers are festive. Bob and I have come to see the Red Stick Ramblers, a Louisiana Cajun band. Their music lifts you and forces you to move, to sway, to shake your hips and kiss your love. We do all of these things, then when the band is done, we start heading up State Street, migrating toward the old train station where our shuttle will pick us up one last time this year. It’s mid-afternoon. The Reunion will carry on for another three hours or so. Bus number 2 trundles into the semicircular drive and we climb on board with Joan. We are the only riders.

Bob had told me earlier that he wanted to hear more of Joan’s story, to hear what exactly it was that old guy said to her, and now he sees opportunity knocking. We talk about the festival, about Joan’s rigorous schedule—she drove from eight o’clock Saturday morning ‘til two o’clock Sunday morning, taking only two fifteen-minute breaks that whole time. Bob steers the conversation to the old-man situation. What was it exactly he said to you? Was he rude? Were you a little flattered? She didn’t hesitate to respond to the gentle prodding. He told me, she said, everybody needs somebody to love. I told him, not me. I’m sure you get plenty of interested men, Bob says. I’ve been asked out a few times by other men, she smiles. But I’m not ready.

Bob and I are leaning in, arms propped on the bar in front of us, trying to catch every word. Bob is in interview mode, leading her gently but deftly where she wants to go anyway. She lost her husband of eighteen years to cancer, she tells us. Not so long ago, I surmise, as I remember distinctly that when we first met her four years ago she was married. I can see that she can’t quite believe she’s telling us all this, but she goes on. She’s just not ready to date. She has fun, she has church friends, they do things together. That’s how she knows the two men who have asked her out. They’re her friends and they’re nice. She really doesn’t want to hurt them. But she told them no.  
 
Joan does not look in the mirror at all now.  She stares ahead at the highway about to roll under us. Very quietly she says, It was horrible, watching him die. It was six months from the time they diagnosed him until he died, and it was so horrible, and she will never get that close to anyone again, because she can never again watch someone she loves die like that.

We’re silent for a moment. Then she tells us about her first husband. After thirteen years of marriage, she discovered that he’d been cheating on her, for a long time, with a woman she thought was her best friend. He told me everything once I knew, she said, he didn’t try to lie to me. He told her he’d been with this woman since shortly after he and Joan were married. 

Her thoughts quickly return to her second husband. We had eighteen wonderful years together; he was a good Christian man. He was always good to me.  We had so many good times, a lot in common. I was really happy with him.

Joan shakes her head, so slightly. She still has her house and her garden.  A
beautiful garden.  She has her friends. And maybe, she says, it’s just too soon for me to think about dating. I don’t think so, though. It’s not that. I just don’t think I can ever do it again.

Now she glances up into the mirror to meet our eyes, each in  turn. Bob says, We just celebrated our fourteenth anniversary this month. That’s good, Joan says, sincerely. Treasure them. Treasure each other, every day that you’re given.

I do.
 
As I stood at my bus stop after work, I witnessed what could have been a Cops show--"watching poor people fight," as Jon Dee Graham says. I can't watch it, myself.

An SUV raced by me (I believe it was gray, Officer), followed in two heartbeats by a police cruiser blaring its siren and speeding madly past. At the intersection just past the bus stop, the SUV hung a right, then the cruiser screeched and squealed on its wheels into the same turn.

I read in the SUV's progress the tiniest hesitation, then about 50 yards up the street it pulled over. The cop car pulled over too, just as the perp popped up out of his vehicle and--what the what!--started walking determinedly up the street. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with close-cut hair (I'm thinking ex-military). He was very dark-skinned and wearing a blazing white polo shirt with what I imagine to be a bulls-eye in the center. He was ignoring the young cops--there's no one there at all, he's thinking--turning his back on them as he walked away. I held my breath. Please, mister, I thought, don't turn your back on a couple of over-excited cops with guns on their hips. The lady cop ran around and in front of the guy while her partner closed the perimeter from behind. Suddenly,whoof! a cloud burst next to the guy's face. It took me a second to comprehend that it wasn't the gunshot I was fearing but a shot of pepper spray. And she missed! Polo shirt staggered a step or two, then continued up the street and over the hill, the cops in pursuit, disappearing from my view.

Where in God's name were the backups? The situation needed to be brought under control. Then I heard them, from every direction, and watched a police car come careening up the road--where I'm still waiting for my bus. I raised my arm and pointed up the street. This cop car braked suddenly and took the right turn on two wheels. As three other cop cars converged on the scene, the young cops and the man in white, handcuffed now but still walking tall, came down the hill, and the suspect was almost nonchalantly led to the first cop car and placed inside.

The suspect had not acted in any way like I thought a criminal would act, and the cops were clearly not disposed to violence or brutality. Huh, I thought. Not really like Cops at all.

Just then, my bus arrived. As I climbed aboard, the driver said, "What's all the drama here?"

 
Late Saturday night we leave the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion festival in Bristol, TN/VA, after groovin to the Drive-By Truckers under a sublime near-full moon, just in time to catch the last shuttle bus to our hotel. We climb aboard the little yellow school bus on the Tennessee side of State Street, a full load of festival revellers, happy, silly, and sated with music, ready to go on partying at our respective hotels.  

Our bus turns onto Volunteer Parkway (go Vols!!), and crossing into the Virginia side of the city of Bristol chugs up Commonwealth Avenue.  Lynn, our bus driver, has put in a 17-hour day in Bus Number 7 and yet is sparkly and tuned into her happy charges.  We glide through a couple green traffic lights and suddenly little yellow school bus Number 2 is coming up on our left, pugnacious and challenging. Inside our bus it's like someone has turned the volume up to 10. The Swedes, who we recognized from among last year's festival attendees, are swinging their heads about (what are these crazy Americans doing now?), and I see our buddy Kendall lurching forward, lurching forward again and again.  Bob and me and some of the others start lurching too, willing the bus to move move, don't let Number 2 pass us.
 
We experience a moment of consternation.  Are they overtaking us? Then Lynn begins to charge ahead through the mountain town streets, winding, curving, move move moving.  We've had a full day of musical bliss, but we are not done, we are plunging into the night, we're now blasting through yellow lights, our Bus Number 7 hangs onto our lead and then we begin to pull ahead.  Number seven! Number seven!

With authority and righteousness, we are yelling at the bus charging alongside us, pumping our fists, somebody flashing the finger at the opposing team, and we're urging Lynn to pick it up, we are with her, the losers in bus Number 2 stare befuddled at us.  Slowly we see defeat dawn on them.  We are out in front, we are winning!  Hey hey, get out of our way! 

We blow past that sorry old school bus, everyone cheering madly.  Bus Number 7 rules! We win! We are the coolest bus ever!
 
I'm riding the 89 home because I missed the 87. We get to Laurel and turn from Main Street onto 5th Street, up one block to Montgomery, then start up the block with the Laurel Armory on the left and the elementary school on the right. Both sides of the street are jammed with cars, big-ass SUVs sticking out into the single traffic lane. The bus driver stops about 20 feet in. I can't do it, she says. 

The bus is nearly wedged in between parked cars on either side. I can't see out this mirror, I can't go on, I'll never make it through, she says. I think maybe she should just inch forward until she knows absolutely she can't make it. How about if I go stand out there and watch your side and wave you through? I say. 

I just now realize there's no one else but me on the bus. The lady bus driver is getting agitated. No, no need, I can see that I won't make it, she says. It's Back to School Night, I say. This happens every year.  

Do you want to try backing out?  I ask her. I'll direct you. I ain't backing this out nowhere, she says. 

After a few fruitless conversations with passers-by, she says, I'm calling in. I can't take this no more. I'm done. Earlier this shift I got detoured because of the maniac in the Discovery building. Now this. I'm not doing this no more.  She plants herself in her seat.

A local connect-a-bus pulls into Fifth Street right behind us, sits there blowing its horn.

What about you? she says to me. We're right in my neighborhood, I can easily walk home from here. I guess I'm going to abandon you, I say, feeling guilty.  Are you gonna be all right?

She waves me off. I walk away, knowing that those cars will be there for another hour and a half, probably. And it will take Metro at least an hour to get some assistance out to this sweet little 89 bus driver. Good luck, I wish her, silently or out loud, I'm not sure.
 
Eighteen years old.  My first job out of high school.  Commuting to downtown Philadelphia on the SEPTA 66 bus from City Line to Bridge Street. 
A man sits next to me; the bus trudges on.  Sleepy, I close my eyes.  Suddenly my eyes snap open.  The man next to me has his hand on my thigh, just below my miniskirt.  Aauuugh!  What do I do?  I cannot see myself making a scene; I'm too shy.  I jump in my seat, my whole body shakes.  The man jerks his hand away.  I do not close my eyes for the rest of the trip but ride, mortified and silent.  I'm just a kid, for god's sake, and I do not know about these things or how to handle them.

The 66 trundles along; I sit there silent and petrified.  The man is on his guard but even the 18-year-old girl knows he yearns to do it again.  I imagine myself standing up, haughtily, and pushing past him out of the seat.  I also imagine him mauling me as I squeeze past.  I just sit there.  There are people standing in the aisle.  They'll see and stop him if he tries to grope me again. Won't they?

Finally, we pull into the El station. I try to stand and discover that he has somehow wedged his foot between my feet and our legs become tangled.  I jerk my leg free.  He exits. I hang back a while and I never see him again. 

My first year of commuting to the city, at eighteen then nineteen, I have a series of horrible experiences in the Philadelphia public transit system.  Then never again. That first year I must have been so innocent, so naive and assailable.  Having earned my stripes after a year of commuting, the creeps and freaks must have recognized my jadedness, the thick skin I had grown.  They never bothered me again.
 
I'm standing at the head of the line at the Greenbelt Metro station R12 bus, because I'm on my way to a doctor's appointment. The disembarking bus opens its doors, a tiny white-haired lady bends down to lower her bag-on-wheels to the ground.  Two women, of varying ages and standing next to me, reach up and take the bag for her, then immediately reach back up to lend the lady a hand for that last, perilous step down. 

Such an elegant gesture.
 
Yesterday  morning I boarded the 8:15 bus, not my usual but I catch it occasionally.  After I settled in my seat, the woman behind me tapped on my shoulder.  You know, she said, this is the bus driver who doesn't take Ivy Lane on the way in, even though he's supposed to.  I was a little flabbergasted.  This woman knows where my usual stop is, even though I don't usually take this bus? Well, it's too hot for you to walk, she said. I told her it's fine, my office building is on the corner and it's really no difference whether I walk from the Ivy Lane stop or the Cherrywood Lane stop. 

As the bus approached Cherrywood Lane, the driver did not pull into the right-turn lane but instead continued on the straight and narrow path to Ivy Lane.  I could feel a glow of satisfaction from my new friend sitting behind me.  I guess he got the message, she said.

Today I'm on the 8:15 and the seat in front of the solicitous woman is empty again and I swing into it and wish her a good morning.  And once again, the bus driver does the right thing and drops me off on Ivy Lane.  Two days in a row.  I catch a glimpse of my friend through the window as the bus pulls away.  She is happy.

I stroll up the shady sidewalk and walk behind and around a car waiting to pull out of the parking lot.  The driver calls out to me, You walkin' real good there, aintcha baby?  He's noticed my cowboy boots.
 
This morning a short ancient gnarly what you would call spindly--oh hell, just say it:  a Popeye kind of guy--got on the bus, counted out his change, said "63 cents okay?".  The bus driver says, Put in sixty, it don't take pennies.  Apparently the fare for senior citizens is now 65 cents, up from what the lady from Ghana was allegedly paying.  He made kind of a big deal about putting his bag on the seat on the left side of the aisle, then standing and swaying in front of it without holding on to anything, then picking it up and depositing it on the seat to the right of the aisle, more swaying and sailing, then down he goes.

Two stops later, a middle-aged gentleman, somewhat portly, gets on and sits across the aisle from Popeye.  Popeye starts in.  Do you believe in the goodness of god? he asks Portly.  Have you thought about it? Portly says sure.  I mean if you do, he continues, then you would see that all we need to do is to eat fruit, vegetables, and nuts to truly appreciate his gifts.  If you do that, you will be healthy and wealthy and wise.  For the love of God, I think, who wants to be preached at on the way to work on public transportation?

As he winds up and delivers, I remember this guy. There was once a sweet Latino mama with her chubby baby who got on that bus, dragging the stroller and hefting the baby bag.  And Popeye lectured that poor girl, who maybe didn't even understand English, very loudly and obnoxiously that she was damaging her baby's health, she needed to feed that baby god's gifts, fruit, vegetables, nuts.  I am boiling angry at this wacko for that poor mom, everyone loves to beat up on mothers of young babies and kids.   But I don't say anything.

This will be a recurring theme in this blog, that I don't say anything.
 
Special guest blogger Robert Earl Hardy shares his bus story.

Austin’s free shuttle, the Armadillo--the ‘Dillo--is an easy way to get around town. Marsha and I are waiting at the stop on Lake Austin Boulevard to take the red line down to Congress. It’s a hot, sunny mid-morning; walking down the street and up to the bus shelter comes a bald-headed guy, maybe 50, maybe 60, possibly homeless based on his street-weary clothes. He joins us, pleasantly excuses himself in a long Texas drawl, and asks me what the date is. I tell him it’s March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day. He’s very happy to hear this, telling us that he has a big green dragon tattooed on his back, that that’s his green. His name is Tim.
"I just got out of jail," he tells us. "I’m a jailbird and a drunk," he says sheepishly, "and a pothead." He asks if I’d like to buy the two-week bus pass they gave him when he got out of jail, which he pulls from his wallet. He sees my Antone’s ("home of the blues") t-shirt and perks up, putting his wallet away, telling me that he’s a musician, a guitar player, and that he’s at this very moment going downtown to try to get his guitar back from the cops. It’s a beautiful old Guild he says, and they’d better not do anything to it. It has his wife’s and his kids’ names carved in the top he says, and they’d better not let any harm come to it.
We get on the bus. He talks about the hard times, and I say that we need a new president to start turning things around. The bus driver suddenly turns around; "Excuse me for interrupting," she says, "but ‘Amen!’" Tim says "You got a match? We’ll do a J"; then he grins--"Just kidding." Marsha looks like Emmylou Harris, he drawls, "but purtier." When we get off at our stop I wish him luck getting his guitar back; he thanks me and says "bye, Emmy,’ to Marsha, grinning.
On the sidewalk I immediately curse myself for not having had the presence of mind to give him a little something, but Marsha says that the moment seemed to pass naturally, and I realize that’s true.

    Author

    Marsha Hardy has been commuting in the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit system - by bus and by Metro train - for the better part of two decades. She has been in transit for six percent of her life.

    Stories are like gifts; they must be accepted without skepticism and shared with others.
      Edward Hollis
      The Secret Lives of Buildings