As the bus rocked on into the cold night, descending into the City from the higher elevation County, a rarely seen creature boarded the bus. A small blonde woman of perhaps 20 years, wearing heavy traveler's backpack, boarded the bus, smartphone in hand, to ask the driver where she was, where he was going, how much it costs, how long she would have to wait for the bus at the crime ridden Overlea Station—all of these questions raising an eyebrow below the large driver's ebony dome.

The witless elf nearly cost half of us our transfer as she held the driver up. But there weren't any bad people on this bus, nobody that wanted to see her left on the corner of Northern Parkway and Harford Road, across the street from where a crew of 15 conduct criminal business.

It becomes obvious that this delightfully spritely bimbo has never been to Baltimore and is visiting someone who cares so little about her that they are not meeting her. Rather, she would be taking three buses [this her second] and then walking through the same ghetto where I have had a dozen close calls in the last year. She was upbeat with compliments about our nice city, a dismissal of the last bus driver's refusal to give her directions—a woman who apparently glared at her—and compliments for the driver as to how "wonderful" he was. By the time we had covered the next mile and turned up across from Overlea Station half of us were shaking our head, especially when she held up the entire bus—all 4 feet 10 inches of her—by standing on the edge of the platform and asking directions of people on the sidewalk while preventing those same people from boarding. Eventually the dumb bitch was gone into the night, hopefully blessed by "the luck of the wildebeest" which the FBI regards as her only chance of survival—that there will not be enough criminals to account for all of the witless human prey as they go about there distracted way, sure that society will protect them from all harm.

Almost a half hour later, back out in the County again, three children board the bus. These are cute, light-skinned children, apparently quadroons, with a pretty, ten-year-old girl holding a sparkling, candy-filled plastic wand with a princess ornament on top, wrangling her two younger siblings, a girl and a boy aged about six and four. The oldest child told the bus driver their destination, informing him that her mother was sending them to their father's place, behind a motel, behind Al's Seafood, where a man was recently beaten and robbed at 3 in the afternoon by a mob of feral youth, across the street from a police substation. The bus driver called out after her as she skipped along the sidewalk, her younger siblings following along, their backpacks bouncing, like the Tin Man and the Scarecrow after Dorothy, skipping down the Yellow Brick Road, "You look out for yourself now," and she waved to him absently and smiled as she led her family, princess wand in hand, skipping into the dark, past that grimy motel that coughed up a dead woman six moths ago.

The bus driver mutters to himself angrily as he pulls off down the dark lane.

If they survive their parents they will grow into people to reckon with on some future night.