nascent joy

It is hard to imagine experiencing the recounted scene: being on duty that evening, among the first responders, in the midst of the work of your profession and having that place you in the position of being the one to pull a severed hand from the dismembered, burning car, to then discover the face of a friend in the remains of two vehicles that moments earlier carried, respectively, a drunk driver and a young family—a couple and their two-months-old child whom you, the firefighter, had babysat the night before. It was the end of that career for him. This was probably 25 or 30 years ago, based on the gray in his hair now, but the memory clearly still haunts him. We only sat together on the bus for a matter of minutes, but when the banter turned from baseball to my profession, out of friendliness I returned the question, his cheerful chattiness with the men seated around us not suggesting to me any territory that would be hard for him to pass back through.

When he’d gotten on he’d sat across from me, smiling at my neighbor in the Giants jacket and asking about tonight’s game. All I’d thought at first was how sports can bring any two people together—the one a slick-haired white guy, donning a track suit and carrying a satchel with Oracle’s name sewn into it, leading me to suspect he was a comfortably retired professional; the other a pock-cheeked, yellow-toothed, shaky-voiced black man, whom I would later learn is a recovering meth addict struggling to comply with his counselor’s seemingly contradictory requirements that he take anti-depressants while he attempts to relieve himself of a substance reliance. Not long into their talk about the west coast final to be played tonight, a third man—latino, cheerful in his mustache, shorts, and flip flops despite the Vietnam Veterans hat atop his head—pitched in his own thoughts on the game, and I was so enjoying the affinity quickly felt among these representatives of different walks of life that I began to smile behind my magazine, inspiring the first one to ask if I followed baseball. To their delight, I responded definitively but kindly no, the sport moving too slowly for my tastes; my bold honesty thankfully coming across as sassy in a good way. Just minutes later, to make room for a passenger in a wheelchair, the first man moved to sit between the Giants fan and me, and there they began to jovially interrogate me about what I do for work, whether I am married, how I am possibly in my 30s given what they identified as youthful looks. Out of respect I asked what the instigator of all this communication among strangers does for work, and that’s when he explained that once he was a firefighter, but just for a few years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked why he quit the profession, but the conversation was so casual and friendly that I felt no inhibition about doing so.

After he departed, getting off near the Social Security office that was his destination, the other man, the one with the sports jacket, looked expectantly at me, so I resumed conversation, asking what he did for work that, as he had already mentioned, had him riding this daily bus to San Francisco. He made an expression like blushing before explaining that his rehab clinic is in the city, that he takes a bus and a train and the MUNI each day to receive treatment, then returns home to care for his 80-year-old mother with dementia and closed-off 85-year-old father. He told me how smart, beautiful, and warm his mother still is, contrasted stories of her with a regretful statement about his hard relationship with his father. We went on in this vein for the rest of the bus ride, him sharing his challenges, me suggesting opportunities he could find to live outside himself: to give to others through volunteer work in order to clear his head of his own concerns or come to believe that he is needed by someone, somewhere, and not to feel so alone. The darkness of his mindset was evident, yet he was enlivened by our conversation, telling me that he would love to take me home to his mother, quickly following that with a “but you would never want me like that” laced with a hopeful glance in my direction. I remained focused on the discussion of him taking care of himself, and he said he’d like to live a moral life like mine—he appreciating my current profession immensely. He said he thanked God that we were having this conversation, that it was going to change his perspective. I asked if he might talk to his minister about opportunities to do service through his church, and he liked the idea but doubted he would really follow through on it. Now I asked him to be sure to do it. His response was that he thought God had put an angel on the bus with him today. Though I do not believe in either entity, I told him that if anyone on the bus was there to give him a wake-up call, it was the first man, who had triggered the whole conversation.

Craig, as I now knew his name to be, then turned to me sharply and said as though with relief, “I saw he had the NA badge on his clothes.” I had to ask for clarification, and he explained the acronym—for Narcotics Anonymous. At a moment like that even I wanted to believe in fate. But what mattered was that Craig believed in it, in God making plans for him. So I said warmly that I thought God was feeling favorably toward him today, and after that he smiled at me quietly before stating that though he might never see me again, he would not forget me. We said only little things after that, him checking that I knew which airport stop to de-board at and asking to carry my bag off for me. But I was left thinking that two people who really needed someone or something had found each other on this day, and though they had spent all of ten minutes together, and though they perhaps each left thinking more of my involvement in the conversation than each other’s, they had found in each other a shared struggle; and in recognizing each other, they had shown the outward signs of nascent joy.