by Harry Goldstein Published May 5, 1997 Previous columns by Harry Goldstein	I ride a crowded rush-hour bus, going uptown from home to work, standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the most hard-bitten public transit veterans in the country. Some are grumpy and plagued by morning breath. Others are too feeble to stand up straight, leaning on me for balance. Some look at me sympathetically or offer me a slug of cheap Popov vodka. Still others are just plain crazy. These fellow travelers visit me at various points during the day, when I'm staring blankly at a computer screen or out the window, like ghosts of bygone dreams. Often, by the time I plop down at my desk, I'm already beaten. Someone spilled coffee on me, or yelled at me for no particular reason, or didn't tell me that I was about to sit in a seat puddled with water leaking in from a faulty seal on the window. Other days I can barely surpress my joy, the ride smooth and fast on a Limited bus that has made a fine run from where I get on at Delancey Street all the way to 47th Street and First Avenue where I get off. Perhaps someone's smiled at me, or I've had an interesting conversation, or I've given up my seat to a grateful oldster, or I've read a magazine article that's got me charged up, or I've made some progress on that novel I've been slogging through for weeks. Then there are those bus encounters that disturb, frighten, fascinate. Like the guy, a couple of months ago, who was sitting across from me for about 20 blocks. I couldn't see him for the first ten blocks, shielded as I was by a mother and child standing in front of me, the kid occasionally shooting me glances which I answered with a raised eyebrow. Over the sound of traffic and the growling bus motor I detected an odd sound, one I couldn't quite place. Tick, tick, rhythmic and close. When the mom and kid got off and I looked across the aisle, there he was, engrossed in his monomaniacal endeavor, picking at his thumbnail. Picking and peeling, peeling and picking again. He wouldn't look at me; he wouldn't look at anything but his thumbnail, or what was left of it, for the next ten blocks. All of his fingers were bandaged. All his fingers, that is, except for his thumbs — the one he was picking at and the one he was picking with. I thought of little else the rest of the day.
here	I can well imagine the peace I might enjoy if, like tens of millions of Americans, I commuted into work by car. I could flip around the radio stations listening to shock jock radio or NPR's Morning Edition, or pop in a new CD, calmly sipping my coffee, thinking about the day ahead, tasks to be accomplished, meetings to attend. I'm sure there's some tension, especially in notoriously difficult traffic cities like LA. Maybe if I lived in LA I'd spend my drive time cleaning a trusty sidearm that I'd affectionately call The Embalmer. Hard to say. I live in New York and take the M15 bus everyday, and have never even owned a car or a gun, or been to LA for that matter. But being privy to so many other people's private moments — lovers' spats, heated debates over the morning's headlines, the exchange between cooing babies and doting mothers, the tribulations of people in wheelchairs as they get on and off the only form of public transportation they can use — has helped me imagine all kinds of lives that I'm not living. Weird as it may seem, I think I'd miss that interaction if I had to ride into work, either by myself or in a car pool with the same people day in and day out. My daily commute exposes me to the world before I have to shut it out and toil through the day in my grim grey cubicle.
here	For that twenty to forty-five minute ride — depending on traffic, weather, local or limited, disposition of the driver, nimbleness of the passengers as they let each other on and off — I can see the big picture by observing the pixels, one by one. We polled Tripod members to find others spend their commute to work — check out their answers in this special edition of Survey Sez. Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals. ©; 1997 Harry Goldstein, all rights reserved.