I step onto the bus and the sheer potential for connection always overwhelms and excites me. When I lived in Washington, D.C., most of the conversations I remember as interesting took place either while waiting for or riding the bus, or while chatting with various taxi drivers. An easy-to-see response, especially in the context of this project, is that I liked these conversations because they allowed me to interact with people who were outside of my "white-middle-class" framework while still protecting the spaces of my life (home, family, friends) from people who were too "different" to be allowed there.

I can see this.

But there are other explanations that work as well. It is true that I didn't make long-term relationships with people I met on the bus or in taxi-cabs, but it is also true that I loved hearing the stories that people seemed to enjoy telling me, and that I was profoundly grateful to the people who smiled at me and let me tell them my stories -- or even chat about the weather. Because I was (and still am) essentially a Midwestern white girl of limited experience, I never felt very at home in Washington DC. I was often lonely there. I didn't make any long-term friendships. In fact, I remember the cab driver who loaned me a book he had written and published himself called The Black Man in America with more interest and affection than many of the people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis over the four years I lived there.

I am not being deliberately simplistic or reductive here.

Our understanding of concepts like race are filtered in direct ways through the myriad of people we come into contact with, and there is something about the moments I have spent chatting in moving taxis, buses, and grocery lines that has shaped my context for the world in ways that are collectively as important as many of the longer term relationships I have had. It is possible to look at these interactions and contemplate all of the ways that they illustrate the power differentials that exist as a result of attitudes about race in our society. Williams' stories are examples of how such encounters can be used in these ways. But I also think her stories (and mine) could be seen as dynamic and unstable collaborations, which might or might not develop into issues of race or gender or sexual orientation or age. Movements backward and forward, in all directions really, pointing not to an ending destination, but to a sense that movement is worth examining for how it shapes the experiences of all the people involved.

A Confession:

I sometimes want to get onto the bus and just ask everyone how their day is going. Where are they going to? Where have they come from? I think I have this urge because the bus is a place where people have to stop -- they are sitting still -- but really they are just passing through on the way to unconnected lives. The connections we make during such movement are part of the way we learn about direction. What is the directional meaning (if any) in my interaction to a woman with a thick Russian accent and fur-lined boots who sat with me on a cold January day and told me stories of taking a visit to Catalina Island once when she was younger? She told me, "There were wild horses, there, on the island. when I was young, when I was just a child." I remember the pavement was slushy with snow that day, and we both warmed ourselves with her memories. It seemed to be a moment of sadness, really -- memories of youth, warmth, having someone to talk to.

I wonder where she is now.
Does she remember that moment in any way?

I was talking about this idea of movement and encounter with a friend, and she shared a bus story with me that has a better connection to issues of race and the incompleteness and frailty of such connections. My goal for this text is to both collapse and maintain a sense of these encounters as taking place in tidy spaces of time and location. Using some of the same tools as Williams, perhaps, I want to allow for spaces where the events are not seen only in a framework of particular encounter connecting to a larger issue, but as moments which both do and don't coalesce into issues of race, gender, sex, age, economics, etc.

The idea of movement seems key to this intention.

I am looking for ways to stop and move forward at the same time.