Bus Report #767

This afternoon I caught the 19 Polk after work. The bus was crowded but I found a seat quickly, when two cute little kids and their mom stood up and got out at the next stop.

Four girls from the middle school up the street (Or maybe it’s a high school? They all had sweatshirts that said ‘class of 2017’ on them) sat in the front of the bus cackling at each other, talking about another friend who had a crush on a boy named Chris, while one of the girls swung from the pole and almost knocked in to a couple of people.

The man sitting in front of me wore a ski parka and smelled like old cigarettes.

A couple got on at the roundabout.

“The problem is, the people that sign up for that class just don’t like to read. They aren’t like us,” said the boy.

“They aren’t word people,” the girl in the couple replied. “They don’t love words like we do.”

“No, they don’t,” said her boyfriend.

At Civic Center, two blond girls with matching frame packs, a fanny-pack-wearing tourist couple, a frail man with a walker and a mom in a very ill-fitting spandex outfit with her chatty little son got on, squishing the already packed together passengers even closer.

The driver stood up and tried to Tetris us so that the man with the walker could sit away from the front door.

And for once, people actually listened and did their best, and made room for the man with the walker and the mom with the chatty son. The frame pack girls bookended a couple of bearded men in Giants T-shirts.

Soon the word-loving couple got out. Someone directed the fanny-pack tourists to the Geary bus, and the frame pack girls sat down when the mom and her little son got out at the first Polk Street stop.

On the sidewalk, a family oohed and ahhed over their little kids’ crayon drawings. A woman stood barefoot in the middle of everything, an empty plastic liquor nip bottle hanging out of her mouth. Her face was pinched into what I can only call a toothless, angry squint. She shuffled away and I didn’t see where she went.

A dad with his little baby girl strapped to his chest knocked on the front door of the bus.

The driver didn’t open the door. Instead, she called out, “There’s a bus right behind me.”

I got out at my stop and went into the café. A second 19 Polk bus arrived a moment later.