davehora.com

The other day I was on a crowded bus, heading back from campus. As is normally the case on the post-4:30 trip home, the front was lined with people left and right. Bleak and rainy days make it worse, nobody wants to walk so the buses get even more packed. This was one of those days. I came to that awkward point near my stop where I’d pushed through the standing crowd and made it up to the front of the queue for hopping off, but with nothing to hold on to or stabilize myself as the driver begins to stop, which tends to turn into a thinly veiled shot at knocking passengers off balance.

Well, it worked.

I was reaching for my wallet to grab my pass and the driver slams on the breaks, lets up for a sec, and pumps them hard again, just in case I wasn’t about to fall the first time. Rather than fall forward on my face with one arm reaching into my back pocket, I take a forward-and-to-the-right trajectory, and end up falling onto an old lady standing on the side of the bus. If only I’d gone forward-and-to-left I wouldn’t have hit her, I think there was a middle-aged guy on that side, but I panicked in the mayhem of the fall and leaned right. I didn’t really hit too her hard, so I looked up, embarrassed, and tried to fix the situation with “Sorry, I’m all over the place here, can’t keep my feet under me,” and give her the old can-we-pretend-that-didn’t-just-happen? smile.

It turns out that this was probably the nicest lady I could’ve hoped to bump into; she looks over and gives me a giant grandmotherly smile. She is a beacon of happiness, brightening up this gloomy Pittsburgh day. I have a sneaking suspicion that she wants to reach into some deep, hidden pockets, fish out a handful of Werther’s Originals, then ask me if I’d like one. She shakes off the incident, and we exchange a few seconds of small talk before the grumpy bus driver makes it known that I need to move it (of course he’s angry; he didn’t get me to flat out fall).

After I show the driver my pass and before I’m about to walk off, she says to me “You know, they always say that the elderly end up losing their balance, but I guess these days it’s you young kids too.” I give her a friendly nod and hop off the bus, when I realize what she just said. I’ve been called out on my balance by the friendliest person I’ve ever met on a bus, and also damaged the balancing reputation of “young kids” in general. I’m sorry fellow young kids, but there was nothing I could do here.