No matter how crummy the commute — and I’ve had some doozies — the time I spend in transit is usually always interesting.

Take today, for instance. It wasn’t one of the better trips I’ve had from home to office, but it was perfect for people watching, for noticing. It was the usual jumble of humans and locomotion that I’m convinced become embedded in me somehow and pop out in my writing or thinking.

In the parking lot, a man in a Nationals cap and a flowered shirt searched his trunk (full of bags and boxes) before walking to the station.  On the train, I sat next to a man reading a book … a book! And on the way out of the train, I heard one of my favorite buskers, an accomplished violinist, tripping through the fourth movement from Schubert’s Trout Quintet. I gave him a dollar.

Walking from the station to the office, a fellow commuter and pacesetter dropped something tiny. It wasn’t money, but he took pains to chase it down and pick it up. Was it a tiny ticket? An important phone number scribbled on a piece of napkin? No, it was a shred of wrapper from the granola bar he was nibbling (tidily, it seems) on the way to work. It was, in short, a human moment, just one of thousands that occur … in transit.