Careless Observer

The first time I can remember it happening is late one night driving a Burnaby route, the one that went past one of the Casinos near New Westminster skytrain Stn. I cleared the hill and a couple of blocks ahead, there he was. I’d never seen him before that moment, but I knew, and since I was bored… I pulled in, opened the door and said, outloud for him to hear me, “I haven’t heard a good story in a long time! I can hardly wait” he says, “wha???” To which I cheerily replied, “oh, never mind, how are you tonight?” And without missing a beat he begins, “my friend, borrowed my wallet, and he never gave it back to me, and so that need a free ride, is that ok?” I immediately granted his request and bade him to have a seat.

Yes

A few years later I was driving a Richmond coach, on the 406 line, I can’t recall what time it was exactly, but a fellow that boarded my bus on Springmont Drive liked how I said hello to him, I guess, and asked if he could sit up front and keep me company, the back of the bus seeming so dark and lonely? “Sure!” I says, “we can play me favourite game!” Well, he bit, “the what game’s that?” He asked, “guess the fare!” Of course he is as curious for details so I continued in my bating style, and each time he bit. “Well, each stop we come to we try to guess if they have cash, a bus pass, or a story!” Yup, he bit again, “a story?!?”

“Yes, you see sometimes they get on and they have a story instead of their bus fare.” Well, that settled, he sat down near the front and we played the game.

About 1/2 an hour later, as we rounded the corner from No. 3 Road onto Cambie eastbound, I saw the crowd waiting at the bus stop about 80 feet ahead of me, “there he is”, I said to my new buddy!

And as our much anticipated young man boarded the bus, and went past fast with an expired pass, I called him back up to the front, “hey there, fella, come up here, we’ve been waiting for you!” And after asking to see his pass again, he immediately launched the story… about his friend, and etc I then went a little further, I told him he’s heading to a dance at the Cambie School (located at Cambie and Jacombs)… his eyes widened… and then I said, “and you’ve already gotten drunk with either zambucha or southern comfort” his eyes grew larger still, and he replied, “southern comfort, how did you…” I think even I was amazed that time 😂

Another time, while driving a number 8 Trolley bus 🚌 n the middle of the day, a big, well built, strong looking man boarded the bus on Fraser at around 19th I think, carrying something heavy that he’d wrapped in a blanket. He had it cradled across his fore arms. Randomly I said, “it’s a cam shaft!” Eyes wide in shock, the man replied, “yeah, it is!”

I’m not making these up, these things really happened.

A young couple boarded my 130 bus, along East Hastings, and said they wanted the Nanaimo stop, it was a little ways down the road, and so we just so happened to have a chat about this and that. As we neared their stop, the conversation allowed for me to tell them that they lived in a room of a house of rented rooms, on Pandora, just east of Nanaimo. They looked genuinely afraid of me at that point.

Carl Jung defined intuition as, “the complex integration of large amounts of information”

In Bible school my experience was a little bit similar. I knew at the beginning of the year that our Evangelism professor was having a nervous breakdown. Later in the year when it came to light, I was not surprised.