Life on a Bus

Madrid’s buses, if I remember correctly, are always full of adorable but fierce elderly people with a firm calling for complaining. Not very different, the Havana buses function like rowdy neighborhood meetings where he who gets the last word is the one who vociferates most. In Mexico, the minibuses are stuffed full and sweltering hot, almost always silent, save for the cumbia music that the radio regurgitates, where students feign dejection in order not to yield space to anyone and old people gaze through the windows with resigned sadness. In New York, on the other hand, the buses are mobile mental hospitals where the crazies of the city arrange dates. In some of my morning routes, I have counted up to seven absolutely crazy but functional people on the same bus.

My last route should have been the most cathartic. Monday, 8:30: A woman of about 70 — wearing slippers with socks, baseball cap on backwards — suddenly stood up and, as if directing an imaginary orchestra, began to swing her arms and sing “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” at the top of her lungs. After some smiles and skeptical whispers, one by one, we passengers began to liven up. All of us except the driver ended up joining in the chorus. In a city where no one drinks on the balcony anymore before six o’clock in the afternoon, or smokes in the park, or extends after-dinner conversations past a dessert and a cup of weak American coffee, the New York buses are perhaps the last retreat on the margin of public conduct norms.

It’s as if their movement, slow and wormy, placed them outside the speed of progress, far from the nets of vigilance, separated from normal discussion and la la la … life goes on.