• “My bus is my bus. I don’t try to make my bus my taxi.”
• “There’s a reason that car is empty.”
• and “Nothing but trouble comes through those doors.”

The first one, of course, is about being patient. The second, about avoiding the stanky car. The third is about those “For Emergency Only,” big red stop sign, “Do Not Open,” “Oh god it’s opening and a homeless guy is going to come into the car and yell ‘Excuse me’ with some nonsense story and go person to person or it’s going to be some lady with a card about being deaf or else it’ll be some kids selling candy for some fake sports program that does not exist, has not existed, will have never have had been existing and I just want to listen to my podcast” doors on each end of the car.

I vowed that before this 1,001-story project is done, I would, at least once, be nothing but trouble.

I’ve been rude on trains before. I’ve danced and I’ve sang and one time I graffito-tagged the wall but I had a Sharpie on me and the priority seating senior citizen with a cane icon is just one top hat and a dot from being a member of The Residents and the temptation was overwhelming. But I always stopped before going car-to-car.

Something about it seemed terrifying, and beyond me. Beyond the notion of the train hitting a random bump and me going flying unnoticed down an ink-black subway tunnel, or getting my shoelace caught and having it pull my ankle slowly, grindingly between axles, or walking in on a car with like 50 cops in it, or some other mishap misadventure that would leave me dead, arrested, mangled in a tube station or otherwise discomfited kept me from pulling that lever and heading to the next car mid-trip.

No more, I thought. Cowardice would no longer be my guiding star. I would find a new Polaris, one based on courage and derring-do and having an old lady eye me askance, pull her grandkids close and say I’m nothing but trouble.

So late at night (it was about 8:30) I crept out from my home (told my wife I was running errands) and headed out for my delve into the underworld (actually ran those errands).

I waited at an elevated station, hot wind rustling my hair on an autumn night that seemed like summer. Through the streetlit, whooshing and dinging and a wind rushing from the tracks announced my train’s arrival. I smiled.

“Depending on the rider, buses and trains can be libraries, bedrooms, cafes, prayer rooms, study halls, confessional booths. They’re mobile piazzas,” writer Adam Morgan once tweeted, because we are in the world where blogs quote tweets.

Medium of the thought aside, it’s a beautiful thought, and true. These grimy, smelly, human-infested transpo-bullets are our shared spaces. They’re the place where people must interact, even if it’s just standing, jostling, eyeing seats and pretending you’re playing music in your earbuds but you really just don’t want anyone to talk to you.

It seems silly that walking between cars meant so much to me. It’s something that other people do every day, not as rebellion or blog fodder, but as the simplest path from A to B. But it was something that scared me, so it had to be done.

The train tumbled northwest through the dark. It went over apartments and parking lots, skirted between condo blocks and zipped over the river, rustling yellowing leaves for a moment before shooting across the water and making me realize this was the train I saw last week from a kayak.

People eased out. Alone in the piazza, I walked slowly to the door.

I put my hand on the lever, and pulled.

Play our CTA simulator

A recent conversation

The kayak

Watching a panhandler panhandle a panhandler

A moment of theater on a New Year train

The Residents

Natural hair, close-cropped but growing out the last remnants of a henna job. It looked good — fashionable and two-tiered. I don’t know if she was hiding it under the white baseball cap turned backwards, or just was wearing a hat. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to stop her scribbling.

She was seamlessly rail-thin in that way only the young can be. 19? 24? Somewhere on the end that says life is dawning and I’ll get an automatic “sir” if we were to talk. But that wasn’t going to happen, as she had earbuds in, the universal public transportation symbol of “I have nothing playing in this, but want a way to tell the world not to talk to me.”

And she wrote. She looked out the window, looked back at the paper and wrote.

I peered, of course I did. I glanced when unnoticed and looked at the world the young woman was creating on college-rule with a blue pen clutched in her left hand.

Lyrics. Or a poem. Something that rhymed at least, whether a song she was going to strum on guitar like the Pink Floyd album cover done in pastel on her hoodie or spat into a mic. She sat and she looked at the world and scribbled something that required rhyming “brain” and “rain.”

And I smiled and felt very old.

This site is ending. There are 11 stories to go and I’ve already written six of them. My song is coming to an end.

So I’m happy to see that other songs are just starting up, poems just getting written by the rail-thin and hopeful. I’m glad to see that we’ve always been a city of people singing to each other and that I got a chance to peer over paper at a song just starting.

And I’m glad to see the writers of tomorrow’s song look nothing like me.

Natural vs. flat hair

Two young writers find their performance

Selling music by the train

He had a baseball cap popped too low on his head, like his mom had shoved it down before licking her thumb to scrub a bit of schmutz off his cheek. He noticed people looking at him — noticed me looking at him — and bit his lower lip, chewing it a bit as the train rumbled northward.

He turned and I got a better look down the aisle of the machine strapped to his hip. I helped pay for it. It could kill us all.

If I am in trouble, I will call a police officer and he or she will be my hero. Hes and shes in the past have been my heroes, both for the good and the demon-ridden sides of me. A woman years ago called me to sit with her after her ex beat her up. By the time the cops found him, he had already been mugged.

He had the shit mugged out of him.

When I saw the moment in the woman’s eyes she realized how that mugging was so quickly timed around the arrival of Chicago Police, a dark part of me cheered. I was 25 and will feel terrible forever about this.

The young cop on the train shifted and squirmed. He adjusted his bulletproof vest and I pictured a little boy on the first day of school, struggling with his backpack straps.

One of the best people I know is a Chicago Police Department officer. He is a truly good, kind man. Knowing who he is off the job affects my perception of police, but the biggest kindness I can give him is to exclude him from this story. He’s not referenced as evidence pro or con about the department. Our connection is just used as another clue I’m an unreliable narrator.

I’m white. The boy cop in the CPD baseball cap is too. His partner isn’t.

The partner — or at least the cop standing next to him — was a firm, staid Hispanic man as impressive as the boy was green. Shirt and haircut so sharp you could cut yourself on the edges, he was a shark trawling amongst us prawn. Triple-chevron on the arm, the sergeant shot his eyes around the train car. The boy did too.

Chin jutted, the sergeant checked the entrances and exits, the blind spots, details I can’t imagine but that an experienced cop knows to look for.

Lip chewed and head pointed toward the floor, the rookie glanced to see who was staring at him.

We were staring at him.

I’m writing this as the jury weighs the fate of Jason Van Dyke, a Chicago police officer who shot and killed a black teenager. It’s become something deeper in Chicago than one more shooting. It’s become a symbol of race and politics, whether the beat cops on the street are predator or prey.

The city is tense, waiting on its referendum on the ones called protector.

The city’s not waiting for my take on the Chicago police, and I’m not offering one. I’m offering no defense. I think Van Dyke murdered a child. Whether he did it through anger or fear isn’t my verdict. I think we all pay when the appointed saints are sinners, but I know my skin, cash and neighborhood mean others will pay far, far more than I ever could.

And I look at the boy on the train.

He’s innocent and grueling, massive and muscular. He could break me and has a gun strapped to him — another endless gun in this endless America — that could end me. Maybe he’s a hero, maybe he’s not, but right now he’s a boy told he’s a man and handed a weapon that makes him a god.

After all, what’s more godly than power over life and death?

I look at his future in the man standing with him, the one who oozes confidence, the one who makes white me feel safe. What will turn A to B? What will tighten those wide eyes, set the lip from bitten to jutting?

And which is more dangerous, the shark or the little boy given a handgun and told to play cops and robbers?

…

The first story for this site happened during the trial of a Chicago police officer. Another decade, another 988 afternoons, another cop on trial. The story was called “Cycles.”

I thought I was being clever.

No matter who leaves first, mornings are the time my wife and I say goodbye, chat about dinner and become our own selves for the day.

This week, though, she has business downtown. So I have company along my morning commute, the ‘L’ path among trees and towers. We rode the train together. My train. And I wonder if she saw.

Instead of the nice, fast transfer off the Brown to Red, which rumblerockets me through lightless tunnels for a ride that’s both efficient and crowded to the point of horrible, I talked her into the better ride. The Brown Line ride that stays in light and air the whole time and where, if I’m lucky, I can get a solo seat and laze out the window as the train takes me not quite but close to exactly the most inconvenient way to access my office.

I wonder if she saw what I see.

My wife’s morning route is one of cars, of sitting alone and collecting her thoughts and playing the songs she likes over the ones I talk her into. It’s her time, her alone and special moments before students and that husband of hers take over her day.

I launch into chaos and noise, bustling city workers and late-sleeping homeless men and women roused by the new crowd on their route. I launch into light and sound and, too often, smell. It excites and energizes me. She relaxes and uncoils into the morning. I, often unwillingly if the bed is warm and the train is piss-smelling, run and dive right in.

I wonder what she sees through those eyes. I wonder if she sees inconvenience where I see energy. I wonder if the approach to downtown gives her the shivers it gives me or a “Here we go again” of jostling crowds of glowering office drones.

She wonders if I would be bored on her car ride. She sees her morning as solitude; I see it as solitary confinement. I wonder what her eyes see.

She asks about a few parks and buildings she’s not noticed before. I tell her what I know, but my majority claim is that I’ve asked myself the same “What is that?” more often on more sloughs south than she has. I don’t know who maintains that garden as the Brown Line makes that aching turn by North. I think this building she mentioned is a restaurant, but the train moved past before I could see which one she meant.

We usually part in the morning, but this one we shared. Odd and beautiful, we held hands and wondered what the other saw.

Listen to a transit duet

And a Christmas wish from street musicians

Play the CTA simulator

South Side hats

It shrieks and croaks and I think if one could actually hear metal fatiguing in real time, that’s what going around the Loop in 2018 would sound like.

I don’t like how the corners all smell like pee, how if you do find a quiet nook where you can prop up against a window, sip coffee and watch the tops of trees meander by, you’re forced to wonder what dried where you’re sitting.

I don’t like when the homeless people scream or when I feel like a horrible person for wishing someone away when they just want to find a place to sleep without freezing to death.

But I’d take all the smell, noise and moral ambiguity a thousand times over Elon Musk.

For those reading this story years later in what I can only assume will be a 300-level class or possibly a focus within a graduate English program studying the great 21st-century bloggist Paul Ctesiphon Dailing, yesterday notated tech guru and compiler of journalistic hit lists Elongated Musk and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced their plan for The X, a series of ramped-up racing tunnels designed to take people willing to pay $25 a pop from the Loop to O’Hare in 12 minutes. Instead of the rickety, panhandler-soaked Blue Line, a series of underground tunnels will take 16-person pods at 150 miles per hour to a two-hour wait for a TSA frisk.

I don’t want this to be a post people can point to years after to laugh at the skepticism people had for an earthshaking event. Lord knows I’ve written enough of those. Musk plans to pay for and run the entire thing himself, using our city as proof-of-concept for his new subterranean moleman empire of hyperloops. I think this could happen, even considering the woes Elongated’s car company Tesla is facing.

Of course, I also think as the tunnel is mid-dig and the project hits the point of no return, Musk will cite a bad economy and demand bond initiatives from the city to finish the job, but I’m a skeptic at heart.

So this post isn’t mocking Elon Reeve Musk other than pointing out his name is an anagram for “seek velour men.” Musk and Rahm’s dream of a Chicago public transit system free of the Chicago public could happen.

Musk is noted for his hatred of public transportation because quite literally “there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer.” He dreams of a smoother, quieter future for the city of Chicago, one free of noise, inconvenience, delays, urine and us.

There’s a tendency among people to not realize they’re the ones being looked down upon. If someone talks about the stupid, the poor, the worthless, the dumb, the human impulse is to nod and say, yep, I hate those people too. When people see a velvet rope cordoning off a VIP section, the instinct is to see the other side as desirable, not to question why there’s a velvet rope at all.

No one wants to admit a billionaire looks at us working slobs and the screaming homeless person and sees no distinction. We’re the people he wants to bypass. We’re the ones he thinks might be serial killers. The $25 admission fee isn’t for cost. It’s an economic velvet rope Elongated knows we won’t cross.

But I wouldn’t want to crush a public works project just because apparently our serial-killer-laden commuter class has to convince a man who launched a sports car with a mannequin driver into space that we’re not insane. Who cares that Musk’s an A-hole? Our city and our transit were created by A-holes. Charles Tyson Yerkes, father of Chicago’s unhyper Loop, was pretty much Iago with a sweet 1900s ‘stache. Boss Daley crushed entire neighborhoods to build freeways. Call Lin-Manuel Miranda because the real lyric should be “Total flaming jerkwads: They get the job done.”

But Elon’s plan isn’t in that league. It’s not posing a revolutionary new system. Beyond the ooh-aah glitz glam of futuristic space pods hoisting a cadre of hypothetical travelers back and forth from one-half of the city’s airports, these are cars that take people 16 at a time to a place the trains already go to. The tech is amazing, but at the end of it, it’s a more expensive, nicer, more exclusive version of a thing that already exists.

Some will use it in order to rush faster to security check-in lines, and some of those will be impressed businesspeople of the type who base multibillion-dollar investment decisions on factors like how quickly they can get in from the airport. At the end of that glorious 12 minutes in heaven ride through moleman’s mole kingdom, however, is still Chicago. Underfunded, broken Chicago with streets full of the mentally ill shunted from programs Rahm cut, with a graft-laden City Hall and a police force reeling from scandal to scandal, with schools no Google, Amazon or other tech guru in this age of digital smokestack-chasing would dare send their kids to. Rahm wants to build a faster train, ignoring the destination.

In the end, Rahm and Elon might get their X. And it might be a success, forcing me to place this post alongside my “Trump will never be president” HuffPo article I linked to above. But the trouble with Elon’s Choice is it’s a false one. Luxury for some or squalor for all.

It doesn’t have to be that way. And turning our civics over to the dilettantes of tech is the surest way to get a sleek, fancy Chicago meant for everyone but us.

Letters, birthday cards, photos of people I had forgotten about and of people I won’t ever be able to. Trinkets and trophies hard-won but now more a matter of storage space than personal pride.

I’ve googled some people from that shared past, disparate present. Of course their photos are lovely and their web presence curated. Of course no one posts the moments of whimsy and maudlin and floating, aimless sad. No one of this crowd but me was dumb enough to put anything but happy things online.

So I went to my happy place — the Chicago public transit system.

I like the train because it’s the best place to be alone in the city. Our shared social contract to avert eyes and pretend the others don’t exist gives makes the crowd our most-private spot. Wordlessly, we enter a covenant to be wordless. Together, we playact loneliness.

The privacy and shared delusion we aren’t heaped in a 2.7-million-strong anthill has increased with technology. Wires in the ears and eyes on the screen have outpaced books and the view from the trains that sail above trees as distraction. I partake, of course, texting and communicating with the people I love, but when I truly want to feel alone, I watch the crowd.

There’s always one or two of me on the train, people who out of curiosity or motion sickness can’t bear to bury themselves in books, magazines, folded but increasingly small newspapers or phones. There’s no rhyme or reason, no type of people watcher.

Sometimes I see a party girl cliché scan the room with a poet’s eye, or a heaping hulk of muscles, gang tats and fear sneak out a peaceful eye-smile that would fit a bodhisattva. Disturbed old men and little children can be fascinated by a leaf outside the window or the shirt of a person in the corner, while people whose garb was assembled to scream “ARTIST” bury themselves in whatever the newest version is of Angry Birds, Candy Crush or 2048.

I cast no aspersion on the people who use technology to reach their loves, or escape the minotaur of boredom stalking the transit map. My stranger-watching is no deeper, no less deep. Their pixels are as much a part of this world as they are, and it makes no matter who chooses to gaze on what, whom or which and when I think that, I feel better about the old photos from the dusty box.

The lines I read and reread in college — for enlightenment and to woo nerdy women, two concepts nondual at the time — floated into my mind.

“All this is full, all that is full. From fullness, fullness comes. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness still remains.”

It doesn’t matter that my life pointed one way and a long-gone stranger’s has pointed another any more than it matters that this woman’s phone screen is turned to this and this woman’s to that. All this is full. All this is life, and the train rocks me to a nod-off sleep as I head toward the work I chose.

The woman was young, white and pretty in a way I find pretty — brunettes with guitars still slay me. Her voice was good too, clear and ringing over trains, bells and post-work crowdmutters. It rang through Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” through Elton John’s “Your Song,” through the most charming, pert version of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” I’ve ever had privilege to set ears on.

The old man, as mention, I’d seen before. He was old, black and charming in the way I find charming. He was a street musician I had watched work the tunnels. His gimmick and contraption was the one-man band apparatus he had built for himself out of garbage — plastic pop bottles stuffed with pennies until they turn maraca, a long wooden spoon packing-taped to his left foot, a detergent bottle on his right one.

I had even written a story about him before, a one-sentence experimental piece that didn’t quite land but that I’m still proud of in my secret hours. I spent 492 pretentious, rambling words to get to one crystal point: I was taken aback both by the beauty of his percussion and by the purity with which he seemed to enjoy it. He seemed enraptured making music alone a year ago as Loyola commuter students failed to realize the caliber of artist they had just walked by.

A year ago, he seemed enraptured alone. A few weeks ago, he seemed positively giddy to have accompaniment.

I don’t know how the pair met, and wasn’t about to ask them to stop their concert for backstory.

I’d lie if I said they entranced the audience. Chicago was and remains a fickle beast, especially after 5 when home, dinner and bad network police procedurals await. But people watched. People recorded it on their phones. And after each pop song re-created and rebuilt buy a man strapped with garbage maracas and a woman with a guitar and a clear, ringing voice, more and more people stopped to clap and cheer. The man’s cup filled.

Another encounter on a train

Another secret of music

Men who dance

It’s not that question, it’s that question. The one we all know. The one we’ve asked and been asked and we winced with discomfort both times.

This that question came from behind me as the train trundled me north from work.

“Can we still be friends?” a woman said into her phone.

It wasn’t a bad that question, wasn’t said with tears and begging, but coming over the phone on a weekday commute, not great.

“Can I still come over and kick it?” she continued.

I thought back, but not to my own past that questions, both those given and received. I thought back to the concept itself. The idea that romantic love’s next evolutionary step is long text exchanges about whether to hit a movie, gazing longingly into eyes that don’t gaze back, planning double dates with you, your partner and the one whose hold you truly crave.

I know no one means that question. The real question is: Can I loiter around your personal space long enough to make you want me again? Can I be coy and flirty and get your friends to punch you in the arm after I leave the room and tell you how stupid you were to let me go? Can I wait in the wings and watch you move on because letting go now hurts too much?

“… watch a movie?” the woman asked into her phone.

It’s a childish notion because love makes us children. We talk of boyish charm, women being girly. Love or lust or that weird combo that makes up 90 percent of such affiliations makes us feel young and vibrant.

And vulnerable.

“… cuddle?” the woman ventured.

Her drop of decibels told me she had hoped the request would come off as coquettish or jokey. She had hoped his sense of humor or his genitals would overcome the awkward, setting her free again to gaze into unloving eyes.

It didn’t. Their goodbye was professional and polite. Her sniffles became held-in sobs, jostling the seat slightly with each whimper.

Heartbreak and the McDouble

More tears on the train

Don’t worry, kid. It gets better.

The place was designed for the young, the beer pong table and oversized Jenga tower attested, but at this early hour it was inhabited by the old. The guys at the bar talking wildly and broadly to pack in as much mock drunkness and youth as possible before their wives call them home for supper, old. The white-haired drinker at the end of the bar, silent but for the occasional gloomy sigh as he stared into nothing, real old.

And the bartender was old, thick Chicago accent that caused me to code switch into my own Chik-kahgo Guy ever so slightly as I ordered a beer to wash down my pita-meat.

I nestled by a window to watch snow glimmer over neon and sexless forms wrapped in scarf and hood hustle down the sidewalk. This was it. This was the place. This mixture of old men in a young bar, of desperation on a poor slip of a rich neighborhood, this sandwich ne’er before seen in my lifetime was a perfect, patented, ready-made 1,001 Chicago Afternoons story.

But first I just need to check something on my phone. 

After years of holding out, I finally caved to the world and got an iPhone. I was tired of group texts coming in jumbled and out of order on my little square gizmo where the keypad snapped out. There were other reasons — I get lost a lot — but the group texts were the big one.

Two separate friends quipped “Welcome to 2008″ when they found out.

I still don’t like it. I don’t like that coworkers who have had iPhones for years didn’t believe me about some of the stuff in the Apple terms of service (they sell your physical location in space), I don’t like how much I paid to fund violence in Africa through coltan mining, I don’t like how every conversation about privacy and the melding of corporations into the sphere of personal relationships ends up with two blinks from the other party and “You can turn off location services.”

And I hate that I cannot put this thing down. Even when trying to eat a burger-on-a-pita at a bar that screamed “story.”

I tried to daydream about the office workers hustling home past snowy windows and sent off a work email instead. I tried to linger over the taste and texture of a really difficult sandwich to eat and ended up checking Twitter. I texted my parents instead of talking to the white-haired old man and I wondered why friends kept telling me a machine that gives a constant stream of access to the president’s thoughts, words, actions and policies would ease my life.

I would put down the phone in disgust, vowing to envelop myself in the real world, then find it in my hand a few seconds later. I’ve checked it four or five times just since I started writing this story.

Beer and structurally problematic sandwich finished, I decided to take the long way to bowling league. The snow shimmied down the skies, glinting in streetlight like cracked glass. It was beautiful and broken, everything I love about a city.

The bus arrived when the app told me it would. I got on board and found a spot among men and women, boys and girls all hunched over checking their own devices. Bowling was typical. Attention and energy lags and by the third game it’s more a matter of keeping myself entertained while my team hunches over their phones, occasionally mentioning something new that popped up about the governor’s race.

My boss got a strike while playing HQ Trivia. Ball in his right hand, phone in his left. The pins erupted. This was the second time I’d seen him do that.

After bowling, I walked in the snow to the bus stop. An old man with a sturdy brown face and kind eyes poking between scarf and hood joined me. He pulled out his phone and I watched the snow.

I do know everything they saw in Chicago last night was quantifiably better than what I saw.

Their texts and bleeps and bloops were messages to dear loved ones, jokes with good friends. They were listening to the music of artists who inspired them. They educated themselves about gubernatorial races and felt the warmth of puppy photos when I was eating an ungainly sandwich and trying to psych myself up to talk to an old rummy. The life you choose on screen absolutely is better than the one splayed out before you with no rhyme, reason or search function.

But it’s my world of old rummies and weird sandwiches. It’s my world of watching pins topple and wondering what bus patrons are thinking. The kind-eyed man at the bus stop communicated with the loves of his life. I watched Ubers blacken and mush the snow on Western Avenue.

If I had been glued to my phone while I rode the bus home, I would have missed when a face-tatted white boy whose eyes said meth and pain smiled and stooped to pick up a piece of paper an old man dropped. He was the only one to help. I would have missed the teen boys’ laughter behind me, and would have missed each flake I saw glisten among neon.

I don’t want to lose this world but I keep picking up my phone to find a better one. I don’t like that at all.

But in this case, the interaction of strangers didn’t end with the warm, human, pleasant, forgettable, boring, space-filling, meaningless little joke of jokes. That’s where it started.

“We’re going to get real cozy here,” I said as the packed train shoved me closer to the old man in the woven mohawk hat.

I was standing on the Red Line, he was sitting in the in-facing seat wedged closest to the Plexiglas partition by the doorway. He laughed at my unfunny jokelet, then asked if it was always this crowded. He didn’t know, he said. He’s retired, he said. He was only on the morning ride to head to a doctor’s appointment, he said in a thin, city-worn, untraceably Eastern European accent.

This is the it that started.

He likes to ride trains, he said. He sometimes gets on board a train just to watch the world go by. He likes to take the Metra up through the North Shore, see all the beautiful houses and end up in Kenosha. He’d like to move to Kenosha, maybe, but he knows he can’t.

“I love Chicago. What keeps me here is the lake. It’s beautiful,” he said, softly repeating “beautiful” and casting piercing blue eyes down for a moment. Those eyes were softly glossed with either nascent cataracts or tears from the cold, dry subway air.

He was 74 and was a house painter from age 16 to his retirement, “almost 50 years,” he said. His father was a house painter too. He liked working on the North Shore most, loved the beautiful houses and the homeowners so free with money. “Good people,” he said, telling a brief diversion about a millionaire family that offered to babysit for him.

He was married at 21, had a son soon after, then a daughter. She owns a shoe store in my neighborhood. He said I should stop by.

“Then we got smart and waited six years,” he said, talking about his youngest.

He had a black North Face jacket, a backpack wedged behind him and a knit wool ear-flap hat over a dirty neon yellow nylon baseball cap. The ear-flap hat was a young person’s hat, with dangly little baubles he had tied in a flooping square knot to keep it tight around his head. A riffle-ridge of fringe mimicked a mohawk. It was the hat of a man who — I hoped prayed and projected — was well-attended by a loving, whimsical younger relatives.

He didn’t talk about his wife. He wrung his work-worn hands with his right over his left. I couldn’t see if there was a ring.

He mostly rode his bike, looping paths around the city, slow ambles up the lake that keeps him in Chicago. He had taken the ride up to the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe the week before. 20 miles there, 20 miles back. In January. He’s 74.

We talked about that foggy Sunday two weeks before where it looked like God erased the waters.

I should mention I gave as good as I got. We traded intersections and talked about parks nearby, bike rides we had taken, places that used to be at places where there’s a new place there now. We talked about train rides and had a brief side chat with another commuter about housing prices in Kenosha. We talked about marriage and kids and the way my wife and I divide the cleaning.

But it was mostly silence, he or I trying to come up with some new topic that would garner a few more of these precious sentences. We joked warm, human, pleasant, forgettable, boring, space-filling, meaningless little jokes about making each other miss our stops. But there was truth in it. We didn’t want this joke-spawned it to end.

He wished me well, this man who likes riding bikes. This man who laughs with pride talking about his children. This man who sometimes takes trains just to watch the world go by. He wished me well and added unprompted “I mean that.”

“My name’s Paul,” he said at one point, reaching up to shake my hand.

“So’s mine,” I said, gripping a future I hoped would happen.

Read a story from that foggy Sunday

Read a far different story of a stranger

A crying woman’s story I cannot tell

“Just wave at them,” he said. “Even if you don’t know anybody on there.”