My diesel-powered Louisville epiphany
By Matthew Ralph

You won’t hear a homeless man improvising a song about kleptomania if your daily commute to and from work is done in a car. Or see a bearded man of Middle Eastern descent wearing a pink jumpsuit carrying barbells. And you definitely won’t see a 400-pound bisexual man talking about wearing skirts to church and how he likes women but finds men cuter.

When I decided to park my car and ride the bus to work, my reasons were mostly practical. Gas was inching above $3 (this was in February), the red lights in downtown Louisville I seemed to always hit in the morning were grating on my nerves and my concern for the environment was coming even more into focus.

I hadn’t really considered the deeper implications of a twice-a-day commute to work via a form of public transportation that, unlike a city subway or a cross-country train, is neither urban chic nor romantic.

Early into my first foray of regular bus commuting, the bizarre characters I started meeting, the odd political conversations overheard and the smells of cheap perfume and body odor led me to develop both an appreciation and an aversion to bus riding I never considered when a $60 gas receipt first sent me over the edge.

The appreciation I discovered was for the sheer diversity of the experience. The aversion developed courtesy of the smells, attitudes and appearances of people I would in my fleshly selfishness much rather ignore than acknowledge.

When I first encountered a man on a wheel chair, my first thought was to be annoyed with having to change seats and the added time to my ride home. My thoughts were far from contemplating the reality of a life lived by someone without the choices or the freedoms I enjoy or to the annoyance he must face every time he has to wait, first for the ramp to come down and then for the bus driver to buckle him in.

More recently, when a woman started spouting off about being “court ordered” and how a bisexual woman had put her cat to sleep, I caught myself being thankful I had not chosen a seat on the other side of the bus where she was sitting instead of pondering the hard life she was living and her obvious desire to be listened to and loved.

The guy with the pink jumpsuit and the barbells? I’m ashamed to admit it, but the Donald Rumsfield-inspired “could he be a terrorist?” thought did cross my mind.

As callous as this may sound, facing the truth of my unedited thoughts and feelings has taught me how much easier it is to say you love and care for the poor and the downtrodden on the fringes of society when they are on the other side of a soup kitchen line or on the receiving end of a donation. Riding the bus has broken down that barrier for me.

People ride the bus for different reasons. When I started out riding the bus, I was living with a family in a wealthier part of town with a scarcity of sidewalks and bus shelters. I rode the bus next to a lot of well-dressed professionals with likely more zeros in their paychecks than mine. For them the bus is most likely a way to avoid rush hour traffic and downtown parking fees. Many even ride for free because of an arrangement between the bus company and their employers (envious of this arrangement, I recently talked my employer into subsidizing my bus pass instead of my parking). On this bus route, I found talking to people who were my neighbors and middle-class peers at home and at work relatively easy and rarely awkward.

But since I moved closer to downtown, I’ve switched to a bus that rides through lower income areas. Instead of seeing the segregation of society in the homes and apartment complexes from my car window on a morning commute, I see it in the people with whom I now ride to work. I’ve discovered why it’s so much easier for people living in the suburbs to condemn the poor and wonder why they can’t just get off welfare and pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they aren’t sharing a seat with them on the bus.

Spiritually, this 30-minute a day exercise has been equally as productive as a revival or retreat. In place of the morning chatter of the radio and cursing traffic, my mornings are filled with quiet meditation (I prefer to go headphone-less) and contemplation of the place I find myself in and the state of my heart. Almost daily, I am confronted and convicted with the harsh reality of my selfishness. If there is a Thomas Merton “Louisville Epiphany” to be found in the past year I’ve lived here, it’s been on a diesel-fume spewing bus that's transported either to or from work in the last four months.

I owe it all to the choice of parking the 2002 Hyundai Sonata now gathering tree sap and debris on the tree-lined street outside my house.

posted [6.19.08]

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