A couple times a year I have an experience on the bus that, when I tell the story, it brings people out of the woodwork to talk about how horrible transit it. This morning was one of those days.

So I don’t want to tell the story. I don’t want to enable people to bash transit by choosing my anomalous experience and treating it as if it is normal.

I’d much rather talk about things like the adorable kid on the bus the day before, dressed in a Batman raincoat (complete with cape!) who was delighted when he saw a dog curled up beneath the feet of another passenger and asked, “May I please pet your doggie?”

Or another kid a few weeks ago, wearing an equally adorable tiger stocking cap, who asked her mother, “When can we go back to the library?”

Or the many times I’ve looked up from the word processor on my iPhone (yes, I have a word processor on my phone; I write scenes to stories while riding the bus to work) to see that most of the passengers sitting around me were reading. Some were reading paper books, some Kindles, some reading on iPads.

Or the time I watched a young man scribbling extremely fast in a thick, very battered looking notebook. I couldn’t see what he was writing, yet even from the distance I could see that his writing was pretty, with sweeping open loops–even though we was writing as if the pen point was in a race to the death against a rocket assisted member of the order chiroptera exiting the underworld.

Or the many conversations that have made me smile.

I don’t want to talk about the two jerks on this morning’s bus (other than this: hon, the 90s are calling, and they want their dance moves back). Maybe I’ll post a version of the tale to I, Anonymous.