Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant

I used to have the lucky pleasure of walking to my university office. Then I had some major abdominal surgeries and spent almost a year in and out of hospital. The time in bed ate up a medical leave plus a sabbatical; it also ate up much of my muscle mass and stamina. When I returned to full-time teaching, I no longer had the fibre to make that forty-minute walk twice a day. I started taking the bus instead.

Public transit in any large city involves a roll of the cosmic dice. Sometimes the ride is on time, warm when it’s cold outside, and bumpily efficient. Other times there are delays, detours, service outages. Almost always there are crazies, tweakers, fizzing anger, malodorous bodies, and violence. The bus I take, the 94A/B along Wellesley Street in downtown Toronto, routinely offers a bustling Boschian spectacle. The coach is often standing-room-only with saddies, drunks, sufferers, and other assorted social cast‑offs. They seem to board laden with grievances...