Twinkly Eyes & Bus drivers

9am on a north bound train heading to the Trinidad & Tobago Consulate to have my passport renewed. Tedium abounds. I am alive with so much new uncertainty in my life. Everything is brand-new, terrifying and exciting oddly feel quite similar. In this new uncertain chapter of my life everything is completely unscripted. Routine was shredded last week and I am a creature of routine; even if it was a routine that I didn’t love.

An old man enters the train and sits in front of me. The smell of unwashed human hair, sour sweat soaked clothes and the sharp acidity of human, fills my nostrils with a burning pungency. His shoes have no laces and flap open over his bare, sock free feet. It is October; the Canadian winter is already lashing windy threats.  People get up and move away from him. He is perhaps not as old as all of his years of sadness have ignited and unleashed in torrents on his face. His matted beard creates the starkest contrast to his shimmery blue eyes, pooling in red blood-shot wells. If sadness had a smell it would be his. My impression is that he has not known happiness for a very long time. Perhaps it’s wrong to place my own conjecture on others. Perhaps I am too quick to judge. Perhaps my inflated ego oversimplifies and makes me think I can try to fix and help.

His eyes are so sullen and I want to reach out and say “brother, I am sorry” but I am wordless. I think about the contrast of how much happiness I have had in life and the cycle of kindness that I am blessed with daily.

I can’t find words to extend to him; I reach in my bag and instead pull out money. I feel stupid and shallow that our world is run by pieces paper and acts of kindness are most easily executed with this sort of trade. I feel mute and plan on slipping it into his hand as I leave; to tell him that I hope his luck changes soon.

But he gets off the train a few stations ahead of mine and I follow thinking this would be a far better opportunity to offer him the bill privately, to not embarrass him. I can always catch the next train.

I try to hand him the money and the rage of brutality in his experiences, the betrayals of money and time and society and sanity and the decaying instability they all cause are unleashed at me. He is screaming at me. He wants no money only to be left alone. His human interactions I can only imagine are the cause of nightmares and I feel foolish to think that I felt money was a tincture.

I apologize and walk away.
Thinking “Great now I have to wait for the next train with this enraged man yelling at me from across the platform”

Walking away from his yells and an older woman puts her arm around me. Her eyes are kind, soft and watery. She said she was about to do the same thing. That she wanted to help him too and loved to see people trying to be kind and not to feel badly. We talked about the unfairness in society. Why some people had to suffer so much. We said goodbye and smiled genuinely as I got on the next train when it arrived. Stranger friends.

I felt crushed that I had perhaps read the situation wrong. That money as charity can be so empty. But also consoled that kindness is everywhere and in almost every human state around us. It cemented my resolve to smile fully with my eyes and all my heart.

The T&T consulate is in an area of the city that I have never been to. I boarded a bus and asked the driver if I was on the right route and what stop I should use. “Well, you tell me which building it is that’s exactly where we will stop” he grinned.

The bus was empty but for one other person. I was joking around with the bus driver, that even though he doesn’t have a Trini passport to renew, he could visit anytime. We laugh and I hear a singular voice from behind saying, “Aye, aye, you is ah Trini too?”

The lady smiles and we exchange pleasantries. The bus driver drops me off right outside the building, halfway between two stops. We all bid goodbye like old friends. This is public transit. Perhaps every stranger is a friend from a time before.

Turns out that after sitting in the consulate for almost an hour, I was missing one document and have to come back again in a month. My mood and impression of this entire experience could have left me feeling very differently. But my faith in the focus of emanating humanity was fully restored. Even if it sometimes falls on ears, that have been too hurt by time to accept. It lives and flourishes everywhere else if you just keep smiling with an open heart and really twinkly eyes.
Humans love twinkly eyes.
They make us feel good.