In the cynicism of our “Hollywood” mentality, we see all too often that
what matters most is who you know, not what you know and who you are.
But
in the moment-to-moment engagements of our daily lives, it sometimes
matters more how we treat the people we don’t know, or hardly know, and
how they treat us. It’s what gives a sense of intimacy, of community, of
being part of something greater than ourselves in a vast, sprawling
metropolis where so much that goes on seems cold and impersonal –
heartless, even.
unfolded when my wife left her purse on the Route 222 bus that dropped
her off outside the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, where she works.
You have to be pretty distracted to leave your purse on a bus, and she was.
Her
car was in the shop. She was running late, worried about missing the
Media District bus at the end of the Orange Line Busway in North
Hollywood, thinking about all she had to do to get ready to leave town
Thursday morning for a family event back East.
As she stood on
the curb at Lankershim waiting for the interminably long light to
change, she saw the Media District bus pulling away and fumed about how a
key point of bus-subway connection for thousands of public-transit
users could be designed in a way that maximized traffic flow for cars
and penalized pedestrians.
So she waited and waited for the next
Media District bus, shared her breakfast of strawberries and apples with
a homeless man, and found out from others at the bus stop that the
Media District bus she saw departing, the 9:17 a.m., was the last one
until evening rush hour. She would have to take the airport bus and
transfer to the Route 222 bus to get to work.
I love this story. Thank you. I hope your trip is a happy one, Deborah. T
That is a great story and you so aptly illustrate how a few kind acts can make the madness a cherished memory and life in this city a bit more tolerable. Thanks for sharing.
This is a good case for the limited usefulness of public transit. LA is too widespread to function without private autos and parking. But we have self-serving MTA officials, commissioners and developers who continue to make our lives miserable by reducing parking even as they attend these meetings in their cars and Hummers.
How absurd that deborah missed the ONE bus of the day until late – very late – nightime, some 12 hours later, despite this being a well-traveled route – that evening, so that Ron had to chase down the one she left the bus on.
Previous commenter is right, that while this is a nice story about strangers helping strangers, it’s really about the absurdly dysfunctional L A “mass transit” system, where buses don’t connect to the metro, and there are no parking lots to park to take the metro in 99% of the city.
Republican Supervisors who rep the outlying areas like Palmdale, interior valleys, Knabe – Antonovich, do their darndest to deny the “metro city” the funds that would allow these bus and shuttle connections to make financial sense of the Metro. On the fraudulent basis that the “inner/ metro” city takes away from THEIR areas, even as “they” commute to work to metro areas, clogging the streets and creating congestion, etc. Meanwhile Democrats like Molina and R-T, like his predecessor, the lady who used city-paid limos with drivers in a subterfuge to hide where she really lives, don’t even care about “metro” areas that don’t represent their own ethnic base. And so it goes. Round and round.
So while we build the metro, at a cost of billions (made exponentially larger by every group from the Cheviott Hills et al bunch to the P C “environmental racism” group Trutanich supports, to those opposing all above-grade crossings)== in reality, no one can get anywhere they need to because options that cost a fraction of extended metro service (like bus connections and shuttles as at airports) simply don’t exist.
“Saving” money this way would be penny-wise pound foolish except that it’s many times that.
The only solution might be to vote in party- neutral candidates. (The REAL kind, not those who become “decline to state” to fool an apathetic electorate.)