Whenever I fly into a city for work, I try to ride the city bus from the airport to the hotel. I do this for a couple of reasons: One, I’m a city kid and city kids grow up taking public transportation. And second, public transportation keeps you in touch with the working class, the locals, and whoever else is trying to get to work, the grocery store, or the clinic. Plus, my dad was a New York City bus driver and somehow I feel at home on the bus—really at home. My favorite bus is the one that runs from the New Orleans airport to downtown and costs a buck and a half.

People riding public transportation don’t see color, don’t see status, don’t see strangers, and they don’t talk much, except the lady who sat in front of me one Sunday afternoon. She carried two or three plastic shopping bags and talked freely, loudly, and to everyone—especially to the lady behind me. There I was, literally in the middle of two people talking past me. 

The woman in front of me told the woman in back of me that she forgot it was Sunday. The buses don’t travel as frequently on weekends as they do on weekdays, and her boyfriend was waiting for her. She was almost an hour late. She said her boyfriend offered to just call her a cab but she refused.

“‘Hundred bucks for a cab!’ I told him. ‘Are you crazy?’”

“Hundred bucks? Really?” asked the woman behind me.

“Naw. More like 25 bucks, but still,” she confessed before changing the subject.

“I love your jacket! Is that down? Must be warm on a crazy cold day like today! Where’d you get it?”

The lady behind me named a discount store. “Everything was like 70 percent off. Serious! 70 percent off!”

The lady in front of me changed the subject again.

“Yesterday I saw a bus driver get out of the bus and chase after a guy who dropped a hundred bucks out of his pocket on the bus. He ran after the guy just to give him back his money. Made me a believer again. Made me a believer in people. Good people. A hundred-dollar bill!”

“Good deeds come back to you,” said the lady behind me. “Always comes back to you. Always.”

Short silence followed. I noticed it.

“I found a wallet once,” the lady in front of me said softly. “Kept the money. Left the wallet and everything else. But I took the money. That was over twenty years ago. I was sick over it for ten years, but I had kids and I had no money. I felt so bad.”

The lady behind me offered solace. “You were meant to have it. God wanted you to have it. He knew you needed it.”

But the lady in front wasn’t buying it. “It was wrong. I felt bad for so many years. Now I try to pay it back whenever I can help somebody else out.”

Witness the way our solitary mistakes stay with us. Witness the way one or two of our regrettable choices purchase a condo in our consciences. Witness the way no one else knows except us. And witness our struggle to let ourselves off the hook.  I know this can be a noble dynamic. I wonder when it can be a crippling one.

We passed a trailer park on Airline Highway and the woman in front of me changed the subject again. The New Orleans weather was unseasonably cold. Everyone was bundled up in layers of clothes not really made for winter. Locals on the bus didn’t have winter clothes like “people up North.” I had on a vest with my collar zippered up and my old baseball hat pulled down near my ears.

“City’s tearing down this trailer park,” she announced as she pointed her nose to the one outside the bus stop. “I know a lot of people who won’t have any place to go.”

“People need places to go when it gets this cold,” said the lady behind me.

“For real,” said the lady in front of me. “I hear that they still got rooms down on Josephine and Magazine.”

“You got a place to stay?” she asked.

I was still looking out at the trailer park, wondering how people will move on when it gets torn down. I noticed the pause in the chatter and looked up. The woman in front of me was staring at me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“How ’bout you? You got a place to stay tonight?” she repeated.

“I’m good.” I nodded casually. “I’m good.”

The middle-aged lady holding plastic grocery bags filled with who knows what, draped in layers of fall clothes to combat the bitter New Orleans cold, had soft eyes. The tone of her voice was warm and sincere.

Without saying anything, I took a mental picture of it and put it in my memory box, in case I ever needed a moment to believe.