Sundry Snapshots

One of the things that I enjoy most about living in Toronto is public transit...at least most of the time. Nothing gives me greater pleasure that watching the people around me as they go about their various lives.

Take Enoch, for example. He's a little old black man who often gets on the same bus that I do, and he's always reaching out to the people around him, asking them how their day was and trying to say something nice to them. Or if no one is sitting handy enough for that, he'll sit and sing hymns to himself.

Then there was the young man, who looked like a hoodlum, dressed in his baggy pants and bling, listening to his music blaring loud enough through his earphones that everyone within a 10 foot radius could hear it. But he was the first one to offer his seat to a little old lady, and to help her lift her little push-cart full of whatever onto the bus.

Whenever I'm on my way to the Walmart, I pass a Catholic church, where the old Italian nonno's are always sitting out in front on a park bench, arguing and laughing and feeding the pigeons. Two benches down, all the nonna's sit and chatter away in rapid Italian, probably talking about their children and grandchildren, and who has died and who is sick - like every other group of grandmothers on earth.

One night, as I was walking home from the bus stop, I noticed a young boy, probably around 8 years old, walking along swinging a plastic bag holding four or five cans of pop and stopping to examine every nook and cranny that he came upon. About 15 feet ahead of him was a woman carrying a couple of pizza boxes, who turned around and called, 'Come on Zach! The sooner we get home, the sooner you get pizza!' At this prompting he closed the gap by about half, and then proceeded to be fascinated by the concept of centrifugal force as it was demonstrated by the cans of pop being swung with increasing force in the plastic bag on his arm.

Not everyone is pleasant to encounter, like the man who got on the bus reeking of alcohol and started giving the bus driver a hard time about the recent deal made between the unions and the TTC. And the man on the side of the road, I assume waiting for someone to come pick him up, yelling about how he hates having to wait and that people should be on time, all the while taking his frustrations out on a poor, unsuspecting newspaper machine.

Regardless of whether they're pleasant or otherwise, I love watching all these people - trying to imagine what their stories are and how they came to be in the place they are now. Where are they going? Who do they consider their friends? What do they think of the people around them, if they notice them at all? It's incredibly fascinating. On a bus or subway car full of people, each person is part of a complex social web, none of which would intersect at all except that for this brief time they share the same purpose of getting from point A to point B using the same means of transportation.