"Stay On The Ride"
by Patty Griffin

Little old man, little old man staring down the road
Waiting on the bus, he's getting kinda cold
Bus finally gets there, he got nowhere to sit down
And the driver said, "You can stand right here behind me or wait for the next one to come around"
And the old man says, "That's okay, I'll stand
I might look like a little old man to you
But I've been riding this bus for years and years and years
I don't even know where it's going to"
And the driver says, "You don't know where this bus is going to?"
Old man says, "No, I don't, do you?"
Driver says, "You don't know where this bus is going to?"
Old man says, "I just want it to get me through
Hey, I'm staying on the ride, it's gonna take me somewhere
Staying on the ride, it's gonna take me somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere"

The bus is rolling along, outside it's looking kinda strange
The Earth is shaking, the clouds are breaking
Everything is blue where it was gray
A thousand rivers flood over fields of snow
The driver looks back in the mirror for the old man
"Where did he go, where did he go?
Oh, there he is
Hey, old man, old man, old man, you still don't know?"
And the old man says, "No, I don't son, but I'm happy to go"
Hey, "I'm staying on the ride, it's gonna take me somewhere"
Hey, he said, "I'm staying on the ride, it's gonna take me somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere

I was born with no name, knowing nothing, still I don't
Somebody said, 'You need a name, I'm gonna give you a name'
And I said, 'No, you won't,' I said, 'No, you won't'"
Oh, "You can let me off here, son, thank you for the ride"
And the driver said, "This is the middle of nowhere, sir,"
He pulls off to the side
And the old man says, "It might look that way to you, maybe it is"
Old man says, "It might look that way to you, son, maybe it is,"
And he says, "Stay on the ride, it's gonna take you somewhere,"
Hey, hey, he said, "Stay on the ride, it's gonna take you somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere
It always takes you somewhere, gonna take you somewhere
It always takes you somewhere, gotta take you somewhere
It always takes you somewhere, gonna take you somewhere
It always takes you somewhere, gonna take you somewhere"

One of my bus buddies with the unlikely name of Calvin is a thin, fiftyish man with sobriety issues.  I remember when he first rode with us, he was drunk and very loud and had a hard time corraling his motherfuckers and he seemed to want to address his grievances to every one of us fellow riders individually.  Ms. Mitchell, who is the best bus driver I've ever known, must have immediately seen right through his bad behavior and took him under her wing, talking to him in a low calm voice and joshing him, keeping him right beside her like the favored student who sits directly in front of the teacher's desk. 

After that I saw him often.  He was usually already on the bus when I got on, and he'd ride as the bus snaked through the neighborhood, picking up sleepy passengers on their way to work, and he'd get off at the last stop before we joined the masses of commuters on the interstate heading toward the Metro station.  I always wondered what his story was.  His usual stop was at a sprawling shopping center, but sometimes he'd get off at random stops before that. When you ride a bus regularly you tend to study your fellow passengers, their habits and points of egress, until you think you know where they work and what they do, whether they live alone or have a family.  Calvin was a tough nut to crack:  How could he be going to work drunk so often? If he wasn't going to work, why did he ride the bus every morning, often apparently after a night of partying?  He dressed in the most outlandish clothes, ghetto outfits, but they were definitely outfits bought to go together, not mismatched streetperson clothes.  He was frequently drunk but he looked healthy and cared for. 

The mystery was partially solved when Ms. Mitchell left our bus route, reassigned as all bus drivers are periodically to a different route.  I didn't see Calvin again for a long time, until once I met him on the street a few blocks away.  He was glad to see me and told me his happy news that Ms. Mitchell was driving our route once again.

So suddenly Calvin was riding the bus again.  And I now knew that he rode the bus only so he could see and talk to Ms. Mitchell.  He paid his fare and rode the five miles or so while still within our town and then he'd get off; I don't know how he got back to where he started from because the bus didn't return that way until the evening rush hour.

Initially Calvin didn't take note of me at all when I got on the bus; he'd just politely step aside so I could pass.  I always greeted Ms. Mitchell, sometimes sharing a joke with her, and I'd wish Calvin good morning as well. And now he became friendly to me and at some point on the trip before the seats filled up he would come and sit beside me for a while and tell me a little about his life. He had three kids and some grandkids.  His youngest son, still in high school, lived with Calvin's mother somewhere near where I lived; that's why Calvin would be in the neighborhood, although he actually lived in the city.  He loved his kids and I could see that he liked to think of himself as a great dad.

Often when he was drunk, he was angry, though I never really knew what he was angry about.  It's never easy for me to understand him, with his street rap, but when he's drunk he slurs so badly that I just don't know what he's talking about.

One morning his eyes were extremely irritated and yellow and weeping, and he explained to me that some woman he was with the night before called the cops on him, I think, and I imagined Calvin being drunk and disorderly and saw where this was going.  The cop of course sprayed pepper spray into his eyes, knocked him to the ground and cuffed him, and then I'm not sure what except that I don't think they actually arrested him because when they sorted it all out there was nothing to arrest him for.  Calvin was in great pain when I saw him that next morning and I knew too that he was much pained by the woman's betrayal and the failure of the cops to understand what a sensitive, good person Calvin is under all that bravado and outrageousness.  Because he is.

One day with great pride he told me that his younger son, who is a talented basketball player on the high school team, was on the cover of the new community phone book.  I went home and got ours out and sure enough there's a good-looking young man in a close layup shot and he has Calvin's eyes.

Calvin tells me that he's a writer, and one day he brings a dog-eared, weathered copybook and shows me the poems he's written.  He drops his voice very low so that I absolutely can't hear him, his eyes rolling toward the front of the bus, and I look closely at the poem he's telling me about and finally I see that he has written a poem for Ms. Mitchell.  His problem I gather is that he doesn't have a computer and he doesn't have nice paper, so I volunteer to type up and print the poem so he can present it to Ms. Mitchell on her birthday.  The very next day he is waiting expectantly for me, and I have to tell him that I haven't typed it yet.  Then I finally do it up real nice, I even find some fancy paper, and I carry it in my bag every day for a week but he's never on the bus.

Eventually he turns up and I give him the poem. He admires my work, and Ms. Mitchell, I will learn later, loves her poem.  I will later type another poem for his woman friend who is a cop.  This poem seems a little ingratiating, about the holy love that the cop shares with her husband. I think Calvin has had an affair with this cop and he is trying to assuage his sin against the husband by praising their love.

I tell Calvin about my daughters and stepson, about our grandbaby who is our joy.  He carefully writes down their names in his bedraggled notebook and comes back bringing the poem he's written for them about a month later.

Last month when my daughter was here, bringing our granddaughter for a long visit to be coddled and cooed over, we were coming home from the Giant in the car when, at the stop sign where I was certainly going to stop anyway, a man and a woman stepped out into the street and the man glanced back at us, then held out his rigid arm importantly to halt us and yelled in a familiar, projecting voice, "Ho, ho, stop, STOP!" My daughter laughed at his dramatic gesture and must then have wondered if I'd lost my mind when I pulled up right next to Calvin and said hey.  He greeted us with surprise and loud pleasure--you can tell that Calvin likes to think of himself as a well-known popular figure in the neighborhood--and continued to shout after us as we drove away, my arm raised out the window in salute.

Ms. Mitchell has not driven our route for months and I don't get to see Calvin much these days.  But the other day I'm walking home from the bus stop and, turning the corner to our street, I spot someone walking down the sidewalk a block and a half away.  Right in front of our house I bend to pick up our newspaper on the walk when suddenly Calvin appears beside me.  He is staggering drunk, and he tries to tell me his sorrows and I just can't get it.  He asks to sit on our step and we both do. Calvin is near tears and he is motherfucking, someone has hurt him, he has just come from North Carolina, something about his son and something about his mother, then there's a cop and then they tortured him, whether the cops or the people he loves, I do not know.  He says over and over, "I'm a writer.  The best goddamn writer in the country."  He keeps throwing those anguished, expressive eyes at me, saying "Do you know how hurt I am?  Do you know how hurt?"  I don't understand what they have done to him, but I can see that he is very very hurt.  I also think about my husband, what will he think if he looks out the window and sees me sitting on the step with a drunk who is talking loud enough that surely all the neighbors must be wondering what I'm doing on that step with a drunk.

I try to think of appropriate platitudes to comfort Calvin, but I can't come up with anything innocuous enough to cover any and all situations that we might be talking about here.  I end up saying, "I know you're very hurt.  I would be very hurt," over and over again.  Finally I start turning my body slightly toward the front door, and Calvin sees that it's time to wrap this up.  He tells me that God sent me there at that moment to find him and to help him, that I am a blessing from God. I think that God must not be very smart or he would have picked someone with better ebonics if he was going to send someone to help Calvin.  I can't think of anything all-purposely comforting, except that, when he blithely throws out there that he wishes he could go home and go to sleep and not wake up again, I tell him of course he will get up again and he will keep going because that is what he does. That's exactly what you do, Calvin, I tell him, I'm looking right into his sweet, plaintive, soulful eyes.  Gratified, he shuffles off down the road and I go on inside, where Bob is taking a nap and has no idea what all he has missed on his own front porch.

Tuesday when I get on the bus in front of my office building there are empty seats for a change.  I walk down the aisle making a beeline for the open seat as an older woman passes me on her way to the front of the bus.

I just had a hard workout at the gym so I am happy to sit.  I glance at the other passengers around me.  They are unusually quiet.  Now the woman I passed is dropping her coins into the coinbox.  She's talking very loudly to the bus at large.  "I'm an old woman.  Doesn't someone realize it takes a while to get to your seat, here I am walking with a stick, I'm not so spry." Now she walks, she does not hobble, to the seat right behind me.

"I pay my way.  I've always paid my way.  He thinks I ain't gonna pay.  I'm 69 years old, I always have money in my pocket for the bus.  I'm almost 70 and I still get paid.  I have a brain and I use it, I'm not losing my mind 'cause I use my brain every day."

I wonder if I should tell her about my mother, who's 79 and almost 80 and still gets paid.  I decide against it.

Now she is warming up to a beloved subject. 

"I work and I get paid and I have an invention. I invented a mobile seat belt. It's for this seat right here.  Safety first they do not care about.  This bus is unsafe, if he stops suddenly we are all going through that front window. "

She turns to her bus seat companion and demands, "Do you realize that? We'd all go right through that window.  I need my brain.  I don't know about you all but I need my brain for working.  I'm 69 years old and I get paid."

The back of my neck is burning. She is sitting RIGHT BEHIND ME, she and her brain are just 2 feet from my brain. All the other passengers on the bus are studiously looking out the windows.  I ride with these people every single day and they never look out the windows.  They're all plugged into their iPods and grooving in place.  But not today. 

"I'm going back home.  This country makes me sick. I'm from Ghana," she says in her plain old ordinary American accent.  "I'm moving back to Ghana, do you realize that?" she asks her seatmate.  My head is frozen in place.  What if she starts interrogating me? 

"I can't stand to live here.  I put my money in the box.  He says I don't pay.   I put in the 60 cents. 60 cents for god's sake, from an old woman."

I'm starting to enjoy this.  If she shouts something at me, I'll think of something calm to say back.  I'll be so calm it will calm her right down.  In the meantime, what's she's saying is getting interesting.  I think about Ghana, about my impressions of Ghana.  Is it more civilized in Ghana than here in the U.S.?  Do they just shrug it off if an old woman doesn't pay her fare?  This doesn't quite gell with my impressions of Ghana.

She starts to rant, something about the N word, and even the N word ending in R.  She has never been this sort of person. 

"I am intelligent.  Yes, I went to school and then I went to work." Blessedly, the woman sitting next to her's cellphone rings, and our lady of Ghana quiets out of respect. "I'm not gonna say another thing."

She gets up and moves into the seat across the aisle.  Now I'm nervous because she has a clear view of me from the side.  Maybe she'll see this as having ready access to my brain. I notice this guy two rows in front of me on the other side.  He is hunching sharply toward the window, wanting to be out there and not in here.  I feel a solidarity with him.  I'm still enjoying it, but with a thrill of danger.

Actually, she sits there very quietly for a time.  Then she moves back into the seat behind me.  She starts talking quietly, conversationally, with the woman next to her, who answers her painstakingly.  The storm has passed. 

We all start grooving in place.