I walked a couple of miles Saturday, from Broadway and Champa to Colfax and Vine (east of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Denver), as detailed in Tuesday’s post. SAME Café was my destination. It’s been getting some national publicity lately from NBC, which reminded me I still hadn’t eaten there.

SAME, which stands for “So All May Eat,” serves lunch for whatever patrons want to pay or an hour’s labor. When I arrived Saturday afternoon, I saw people who looked as if they might be homeless and others who didn’t. The three people behind the counter smiled and served food with alacrity. I shared a table with a group of twenty-somethings raving over the pizza with black beans and corn. My own meal, a green salad with carrot-ginger soup, was fresh but not wildly tasty, though the lemon-coated shortbread cookie helped make up for it.

Then I went to Bixa across the street and bought some fair trade tea.

The highlight of my Saturday, though, was the ride on the 15 bus (the adopter’s name is “William Tell”). After tromping back west on Colfax, I caught the bus and settled in to read my friend Sybil’s new novel. A white man with a huge black suitcase clutched to his front took up more than his share of the handicapped seats. He complained about the white guy in the wheelchair running over everyone’s feet, and my seatmate made a soft but pointed remark about his suitcase. Then the real fun began. Two black women were trying to get people to open the windows so they could get a little air on this warm day.

They called out, “Wheelchair guy, can you open that window?”

To my amazement, he stood up, clutching the vertical bar, and wrestled with the latch, but it was bolted shut.

“That’s OK, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” they said. He sat back down.

Then one of them started talking about choking some woman who had pissed her off.

“Some people just deserve it, you know?”

The white woman in the seat behind me, who had taken one look at me when she got on and decided I would not be her bus companion for this trip, told them she loved them. They were startled, as you might expect. Then she urged them to get strong with the Lord. They were noncommittal.

“There are some crazy people on this bus,” she added as a parting shot (though I’m sure she didn’t mean this mean in the trench coat).

Any good bus stories? Please share in the comments.