The woman who boarded my bus today used to be six years old

Dear Delyara, I drove city buses for forty-one years before retiring. Today, I took my old route as a passenger because my wife says retirement has made me unbearable at home. A woman got on with two children. She stared at me, then asked whether my name was Manuel. I said yes. She told me that when she was six, her mother sometimes had no money for bus fare, and I used to wave them aboard anyway. I did not remember. She did. She said there were mornings when getting that bus meant she reached school and her mother reached cleaning jobs on time. Then she introduced her children and said, “This man used to drive Mummy to school.” I wanted to tell her I had probably broken company rules. Instead, I shook the children’s hands like an idiot. For four decades, I measured work in routes completed, delays avoided, complaints received, tickets sold. I had never considered that somebody might remember the mornings I deliberately looked away from an empty purse. When I got home, my wife asked whether riding the bus had cured me of missing work. I said no. It made it worse, but differently. Apparently, while I thought I was only driving people across a city, some of them were quietly attaching pieces of their childhood to my steering wheel.