A woman in her late fifties sat beside me on the way home. She smelled of cigarette smoke and had two long, blonde whiskers growing from her chin. Knitting was her thing. She had a huge bag of dark green wool on her lap and she knitted, all the way from Milwaukee to Detroit. The sound that the needles made reminded me of an insect scuttling across the floor. Knitting strikes me as a default setting, a physical routine that erases the mind, an activity you can turn to whenever you need to remove yourself from the life you’re living. I imagined this woman obsessively knitting. Getting home from the job she hates, she turns on the television and begins to knit, her knitting a compulsive manifestation of unhappiness, like some people play the slots.
Behind this woman sat her son, who was in his mid to late twenties. He was big and had a bunch of facial hair. He looked like he liked to drink mountain dew by the liter. He looked like he was going to have a hard time finding anything that he was good at in this world, that he would one day have to find his knitting equivalent. At the end of the journey, mother and son bickered about whether mom should recycle her coke can or just leave it on the bus. Mom won the argument and left the can on the bus, shooting the young man a defining look, and then they stepped into their lives in Detroit.