The Healing Power of TCAT Bus Drivers
Just about the time I was expecting Sarah to arrive at my downtown psychotherapy office, the phone rang. It was Sarah.
I knew she was distraught when she had called earlier. Now she was hysterical. She was sobbing so much it took a bit to figure out what she was saying. She had been riding her regular bus from Cornell to see me. A minute after she stepped off the bus at her stop at the bottom of State Street Hill, she abruptly realized that she had forgotten her purse. She must have left it on the seat next to her. “That has everything in it!” She wailed. This was a final straw. As she had been hospitalized multiple times for suicidal attempts before she began to see me, I was worried. I calmed her down and told her to just come in and we’d call the TCAT office together. “They’ll find it, and they’ll have it down there. The money will probably still be in it. I can give you a ride.”
As an Ithacan, I know that’s how they do things at TCAT. Sarah was from New Jersey. She was just here for graduate school. I knew she didn’t believe me. But a few minutes later she showed up in my office, holding her purse tightly to her side. “I don’t believe this!” She said, shaking her head. “That bus driver headed off to the bus garage when he said he saw the purse and knew it was mine. He remembered me! I ride everyday. So he turned the bus around and went back around the Commons and up Green Street slowly until he spotted me by the drugstore. He stopped, opened the bus door, and reached an arm out and handed me my purse.”
In my office, she was no longer suicidal. Was that because she was seeing a psychotherapist? The answer to this is no. She was not suicidal because she had encountered an Ithaca bus driver. And not only had she encountered a driver who remembered her, but clearly he knew that under the correct conditions, he was permitted to be compassionate. Try that in New Jersey!
There is, or course, more than this one interaction in this story of extending care to a stranger. Early last September, Laura excused herself from our usual bunch of regulars at Gimme Cayuga Street and headed off to work at Cornell. “I have to be at the bus early this week,” she explained, finishing off her coffee. “This is the week I show the new students how to thank the bus driver.”
I am going to suggest in this column that way we do things here is more than the silliness of an eastern Portlandia. (I confess to finding this show too close to home to watch.) I intend to tell stories about the myriad ways in which living in Ithaca increases health and well-being. There is a little-known sea of scientific research on this phenomenon that I am going to talk about. Ithaca, I think, is one of the last remaining places in our country in which a local cultural life still flourishes. We are like the apple orchards in the county that keep heritage apples alive. Or maybe like a seed vault. We have been keeping something alive in our “centrally isolated” valley “surrounded by reality,” which you cannot reach on a superhighway. Perhaps we are growing and nurturing something essential and rare in a hard time. Maybe someday, like a heritage apple orchard, we can help others remember what was once common. Maybe our our flourishing cultural habits can be rootstock from which the country could someday be replanted.