Thinking of all the things I might have said at this moment, I trailed along behind the two speakers. I followed them for as long as I could, pulled by my need to connect myself to their experience, although I couldn't say a word. I was trapped inside myself, knowing that I wouldn't, maybe couldn't say a "right thing." Perhaps there was no right thing to say. Perhaps it was foolish or offensive to even consider intruding on their private conversation (though I did want to). I knew that if I spoke to them, they would necessarily misunderstand. And it wouldn't change anything, anyway.

No difference.

But there was that desire to to try, somehow,  to engage in the situation.

They turned off to the right and I walked to the bus stop. For a few minutes I stood looking at a lilac bush near the bus stop and thinking about whether I could plant one in my yard or whether it would grow too big. How much would a lilac bush cost, I wondered. Then several things happened...

A white girl with dark brown hair and pale skin
came up to me and asked me if the Blue bus had been by.
I told her I'd been waiting for that bus and she hadn't missed it.
"Thank you," she said.

I saw the bus coming and moved to stand at the curb, next to a young African American woman.

We got on the bus. The bus driver said hello to me and smiled. He knows me. I ride the 1:30 Blue bus almost every MWF during the semester. The black woman got on before me. He did not smile or say hello to her. He is white. Maybe he didn't know her?

Why does it even matter what color these people were...of course it matters,
but to whom and why?
I don't have any answers.

I walked through the bus until I found an empty seat. As we rumbled along I saw that the university had plowed up part of a field outside of the football stadium where the marching band used to practice. Suddenly I caught the eye of a black woman sitting in the seat in front of me. Assuming she was also looking at the plowed-up field, I said: "I hope they aren't going to plant more corn!" (corn being a major crop in the agricultural communities which surround the university) The woman smiled at me, but in a confused way, so I tried to explain. "The band used to practice there and now they've ploughed it up and I was just hoping they wouldn't plant more corn..." she smiled again and said something friendly, but she was looking at me in a way that said clearly, "You are a FREAK."

So I looked down at my book and didn't say anything more. "You are a freak," I thought to myself -- I didn't feel any better. I said, only to myself and not aloud this time: Who do you think you're fooling, making these attempts to "play nice" when the bus driver wouldn't stop for the young black woman and you're not going to change that by making ridiculous remarks about corn.  I couldn't change the angry face of the girl for whom the bus wouldn't stop and one child kills another, looking down at him as the gray matter spreads onto the floor of the cafeteria. His mind is sick -- or is that our collective mind?

What is the point here?