Yesterday, Busnerd and I had to go to Northgate to run an errand. We started our trip on the 48 and spent about 20 minutes of the ride sitting behind a pretty standard instance of college bus luh: a jock-looking guy and a ponytailed girl, holding hands, rubbing each other’s shoulders and thighs, and kissing occasionally. We caught the 16 at 82nd and Wallingford (incidentally, in front of my youngest brother Joel‘s old high school) and rode with a few more couples to Northgate Way and 5th Ave NE. The store we visited was also filled with couples in love (yes, folks, we were ordering our wedding rings), and so was the stop where we waited after we were finished. (Actually, there were two other people at the stop–a guy and a girl–and I can’t prove that they were in love or even that they were a couple, but I’m going with it for the sake of the story.)

The 16 ride back to 82nd and Wallingford was uneventful, as was the 48 ride back to my neighborhood–that is, until the bus was delayed less than a block from my stop by a fire truck backing into the station. During the wait, a man approached us and asked (in Spanish) to borrow a pen. I handed him one of the many in my bus chick bag, at which point he returned to the back to perform a bus mack on a woman who was riding with her pre-teen son, and who, as far as I could tell, did not speak a word of Spanish. He managed to get the digits nonetheless (wish I’d been close enough peep his technique), and after he had finished writing them down, he politely thanked her.

Her reply:

“No, thank you. I really needed this.”