It’s in the waiting, the interminable waiting… that’s where you can sometimes learn ‘between the lines’, on the way to this and that.

You learn that in some neighborhoods, public buses usually only come once every hour or so, and if you miss it you are late for work – really late, with no other apparent options.

You find that people who are long accustomed to waiting for a bus on some hot and crowded street corner often seem easy with each other, greeting and speaking together… perhaps an unexpected gift of the waiting and slowness, this way of finding the deeper shade of common ground.

You discover that on a fiercely hot summer day the cool taste of a handmade Snow Ball (a mound of ice and corn syrup and fruitiness that takes so long to make that you have to run to catch the bus while precariously balancing it in your hand) is sooo sweet and delicious… and that it makes the waiting well worth it.

You realize that a nondescript Qwik Stop with a too-narrow overhanging roof can become a place of refuge for singing in the afternoon rain together, song after heartily sung song, to pass the time until the long awaited and seemingly random bus comes by.

You come to understand that the long space between getting off of a ferry and onto an overdue bus can be made shorter by discovering the generosity of spirit and simple hospitality that turn out to be present

in an otherwise closed bar, a bar where at 9 a.m. in response to our persistent knock, the door swings open and the owner grants your simple request for some much needed ice to keep some hand-carried lunches we are bringing to work barely cool until the bus comes.

When you really look, you see that when a person falls down at some broken curb across the street from where you and others are waiting for yet another bus in the sweltering hotness of shadeless summer heat, others can be slow to help that person up… and that, as the fallen one finally rises with the help of kind strangers, when a certain pants stain and crookedness of walk become obvious, so too do her neighbor’s words sink in… that the pants and the walk and her fall more than suggest one too many drinks, and being hit by cars once too often when she sometimes veers into the busy street.

In the end, you recognize that you have the choice of knocking persistently, asking for favors, savoring Snow Balls, and singing in the rain with new friends, and that this place and time and circumstance are only temporary, the waiting perhaps made more bearable and easily tolerated just because you know you can leave soon and go back to your more comfortable home and life. It dawns on you that this has been a blessed time and most welcomed experience shared with a wonderful and spirited team… and yet there is this little voice telling you that those people who live in this neighborhood don’t always have a choice of whether or not to wait or to leave. Knowing that, you understand that you can’t really go back to the way things were before this trip.

kate zilla

aug. 6, 2011