Aboard the Lucky Star Bus

Yesterday, I was in Boston. Then from Boston, I took the bus to New York and I spent a night in Brooklyn, in an all African-American neighborhood, crashing at a friend's boyfriend's house. Now I'm at my friend's place in Westchester where Sarah-Lawrence is located. There's a castle (a real one) across the street from where I am staying. I've been told that it's been on the market for years and nobody wants to buy it. These are two very different neighborhoods, for sure. In any case, I'll be going back to Boston on Friday. When I go back, I will be crashing with a friend in Jamaica Plain and not with my sister in Somerville.

While on the bus to New York from Boston, the Lucky Star pulled over at a McDonalds for fifteen minutes. I sat in the bus and watched people get off and buy their McDonalds and sit at the picnic table outside smoking and eating. The warm sun was shining down on the scene, melting away the New England winter. One of the Spanish speaking teenage girls went over to a Chinese boy and asked for a light, and he lit her cigarette for her. It was a casual exchange that didn't need much verbal communication.

There were all sorts of people. Different colors, different sizes, different ages, and most of them were speaking in different languages. I detected various accents in the languages as well. The Chinese people were speaking Mandarin and I surmised one man was from North Africa because he spoke French with an accent and he was black. He sat next to a fussy white lady on the bus (she didn't understand at first that this was the $15 Lucky Star bus from South Station to New York Chinatown, not a $150 American Airlines ticket from Logan to JFK) and by the time we got off in New York the two were friends.

I sat on the bus soaking all this in and I thought it was beautiful.