I am grateful for random connections and occurrences. Sometimes you could call it serendipity. At times, foreordained. Other times, Woo-woo! This happened for me while on the bus today. It was this afternoon and I was on my way home from a walk in the forest. The bus was crowded and I had to look for a vacant seat in the courtesy section, where I usually try not to sit. It isn't because I don't qualify. I am over sixty which places me securely in the seniors' category. But I am a robust and very fit senior and no I don't need to sit down on the bus, unless I'm exhausted or schlepping with me a heavy bag of groceries, in which case I am neither shy about accepting an offered seat nor from politely asking for one, even if I am likely twice as fit as the lazy twenty-something who has chosen to obey their conscience. I like to think of it as being gracious in accepting proffered kindness, as well as encouraging good behaviour in young people.
While seated, and then for a while standing, on the bus, I found myself thinking how everyone on this bus has a father or a mother, and some of them likely have children of their own. That thought kept returning to me, rather like a somewhat unhinged pedestrian walking round and round in a revolving door. I tried to imagine each passenger as being a member of a family. I tried to visualize their parents, for some reason especially their fathers, I think because fathers still seem to have less visibility in families. I tried to imagine what life in each of these families must have been like; how present the fathers were in the lives of their children; if these were happy families, or not; of what they enjoyed doing together; of what kinds of things they usually said to each other: all those little private and discreet rituals and passwords that signify the uniqueness of each family.
Passengers came and went. I noticed one rather short man around my age standing, clinging tightly with both hands. Twice I saw him refuse seats that were offered to him. Then a seat came available. I waited to see if he would take it, or the young twenty-something woman next to him. She seemed to be held motionless by a paralysis of conscience. He still didn`t appear to want to sit, so I said, "Okay, I'll take it, then." I checked again with the older gentleman and he gestured that we was fine standing.
I soon noticed that he was speaking in a foreign language with a young man, presumably his son, standing next to him. There was a lot of ambient noise so I couldn't tell at first that it was Spanish. I heard something identifiably Spanish spoken between the young man and his mother seated behind me and I realized by their accent that they were from Spain. I engaged the young man in a conversation in Spanish, asking first if they were from Spain, and that I enjoy eavesdropping in Spanish and identifying different national accents. He was a pleasant young man, and said he was studying English here in Vancouver and his parents were visiting him.
When I came home I thought, how interesting that after wondering about the fathers and mothers of the different passengers that I should have an encounter with this small family group. They were from Barcelona, by the way, and it could be that I couldn't understand what the father and son were saying earlier because they were likely speaking Catalan, a very distinctive language from Spanish and the second official language in Catalonia where Barcelona is the principal city. I also noticed that the young man's parents looked as though they had had rather hard and difficult lives. Being my age they would have been around twenty when el generalisimo Franco passed away, thus enabling Spain to emerge from nearly forty years of dictatorship into a thriving liberal democracy. Unlike the son, who would have been in his twenties, the parents looked restrained and restricted, obviously survivors of a brutal regime. I am very thankful that I have never lived under a dictatorship, military or otherwise.
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