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Until a few hours ago it had been a long time since I’d taken a bus after dark. I hadn’t forgotten why but the novelty went a long way towards ameliorating the dispiriting, soul-chafing effects of night-bus culture.

People like to eat Slim Jims and chug chocolate milk and stare into space and talk to people they don’t know or no one in particular while riding the bus at night. You can have several different levels of interaction with people whose grips on reality vary widely in tenacity, when the sky is dark, the stops few and far between and the destinations less urgent than they are at the beginning or the end of a workday. Bussing on the weekend is an entirely different matter, far beyond the scope of this post.

Tonight on the ride home after going 5 for 8 with some high-pri names, I was starting over with the much-belabored baby blanket that defied my puzzling over it until it was too late to remedy my misinterpretation of the (albeit devious) pattern. Since it’s knitted, and full of holes made by yo, many of which (8 every other row, to be exact) occur at the corners of the square that is the blanket’s shape, there was nothing to do but tear it down almost to the cast-on and knit it up again. Perfect this time, it will be if it kills me. But it won’t even come close.

Knitting is something that anyone can get right, if they stick with it. Jury’s out on whether anyone living currently or previously has ever derived as much satisfaction as I do from not only the getting right aspect, but in equal measure the finishing of what I start no matter how many starts that means.

Amazing, and just beautiful, and how could anyone ever appreciate what it takes to make such a thing, especially a baby, according to the man who sat down beside me and after ascertaining the nature and end user of my handiwork, launched into that litany, interspersed with chuckles, shakes of the head, non-sequitur outcries of “oh god” and post-stop announcements of each stop, followed by more wonderment at the quickness of our progress along the route.

We’re moving so fast on this bus, he said. How can you keep track of all those twigs (dpns, using all 5)? It’s just amazing, and beautiful, it really is. How do you know how to do that? Will the baby ever know what it takes to make something like that?

The less-poetic part of this encounter would have to be the high dudgeon with which he accused me of “cheating” by consulting the pattern; it seemed to dissipate the magic for him, to make him feel deceived in some way, at least for each 15-second recurring period of disillusionment before he was once again in transports of rapture, solicitous of my twigs.

When you’re on a bus at night, and it’s raining, you’re surrounded by strangers and you are moved to reach out to someone but don’t know quite how to make a connection (or maybe even whether you have), because of your brain and/or the chemicals it’s bathed in, how could whisked-away mystery be so much more devastating than everything else that is wrong with your world?