Driver’s Good Turn Goes a Long Way

Her name is--well, I’m afraid to tell you her name. I’m afraid she’ll get in trouble. In trouble for doing a good deed. Call her Marguerite. She’s a bus driver.

I met her Tuesday night while driving home to Yorba Linda from the newspaper. My 12-year-old Toyota decided to die on the Santa Ana Freeway an hour before sunset.

I limped off the freeway, got the car towed to a shop and pondered my options. I couldn’t reach anyone to pick me up, so I figured I’d take a bus. I didn’t know the routes, but I was on a major street. I figured I’d just head east. But I was 25 miles from home and it was getting dark.

A bus pulled up. I got on and asked the driver how far she was going. Just four more lights, she said. That’s as far as the route went. There was another route I could take from there, but after that she didn’t know. This was clearly going to be a longer night than I thought.

She dropped me off at the end of her route and told me what bus to look for. Fifteen minutes went by, then 30. I started to think I was going to wind up with a very expensive cab ride home--and then my bus pulled up.

But it wasn’t my bus. It was out of service, no lighted number above its windshield. Then the door opened, and darned if it wasn’t the same driver: Marguerite.

“I just can’t leave you here standing there in the dark,” she said. “This isn’t the nicest place.

“Get in,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

*

*

You’ll drive me home in the bus? I asked, genuinely perplexed. I’m as much a creature of big-city life as anyone. Perhaps I’ve conditioned myself to never expect people to reach out when it doesn’t serve their purposes. I guess I’ve bought into the lore that Los Angeles is impersonal, bleak, filled with people who stride by each other without glancing or caring. This offer should not have felt disorienting, but it did.

“No, I’ll take you in my car,” she said.

You can’t do that, I said. It’s a long way.

“Come on,” she said. “I have nothing else to do.”

We took the bus to the depot in another city where she starts her route and parks her car. (As I said, I’m keeping this vague because, having conditioned myself to expect the worst, I don’t want her punished for breaking a company rule.)

As we drove, just the two of us, she began telling me a story that at first sounded like a fable, but at its end explained why she was helping me.

A few days earlier, her brother had run out of gas on the way to work. A good Samaritan had picked him up, taken him to a gas station and driven him all the way back to the car so he could get to work.

“I’m just passing the favor along,” she said.

*

*

We kept driving. I told her I wanted to give her some money as a thank-you. She wouldn’t hear of it.

“That wouldn’t make it a favor,” she said. “You just do something nice for somebody. Pass the favor along.”

She has four kids and a husband, I learned on the ride home. The kids were doing well, two of them in college, two others planning on going. No gangs, no drugs. She loved driving a bus, just loved it, mainly because of the people she gets to meet and to help.

Once she’d had a passenger, an elderly woman who rode her bus often, she said. It was a hot day--too hot, she judged, for the woman to walk several blocks to her house. So she took the bus off its route and took the woman to her home.

As we talked, I thought to myself: Are you blessed when you meet a total stranger who offers to do you such a big favor? Should I buy a lottery ticket tonight? Is it really this unusual? Or is this what is going on all around us all the time, in normal life, and we’re so assaulted by satellite images of urban horror and fright that we can’t imagine that people reach out to other people every day?

We stopped near my house and gassed up her car. That was all she would take. No money.

“No,” Marguerite said, “that wouldn’t make it a favor.”

I told a number of friends at work about Marguerite and what she had done. My God, they said, a bus driver did that?

It’s sad to think that random acts of kindness are so rare that people respond with amazement or goose bumps. In a small town, this would have been nothing. In Los Angeles, it’s a cosmic event.

Let’s change that. If you liked this story, do something that creates another one.

Pass the favor along.