After I ran a few errands in Center City on Sunday, I wandered over to Broad & Chestnut, right near our sand-castle of a City Hall, to wait for the 32 bus. The bus wasn’t coming for a while, but there was a free seat in the bus shelter and it wasn’t too chilly out. I wedged myself into the anti-homeless bench (with its useless armrests, and seats not wide enough for larger people to sit in) and eavesdropped slightly on the other two people on the bench. They weren’t speaking a language I knew; perhaps it was Russian, but it didn’t seem vehement enough. The woman caught my eye once; her own eyes were blue, and her face was round.

The man kept checking an app on his phone that I didn’t recognize, and mumbling, and the woman was muttering in his direction. I looked at my own transit app, then looked up to see my bus going the other way, which means it would be at its turnaround point soon and ready to come my way. A lot of other buses stop at Broad & Chestnut, but I wanted the one that stops a block from my house.

Sometimes, further on, if the bus going the other way empties out, the driver pulls over on its way to the turnaround point and darts down into the subway to use the bathroom there. It’s a long route. So I wasn’t going to stand up and wait until I knew it had started its return trip.

Downtown was fairly empty; it was Sunday, and there was a distance run happening on the Parkway, though that shouldn’t have affected traffic. A van drove past, its vast and cavernous sound system making everything vibrate to the R&B; the sides of the van advertised tire services.

The van moved at a glacial pace, favoring us with the sound for a good while. There are red-light cameras at City Hall now, so people tend to go much more slowly in that weird roundabout than they used to. Philadelphia City Hall is at the absolute center of a gridded Center City, and all traffic going North, South, East, or West has to slowly veer around it.

A shriek came from the direction of City Hall, and I looked up to see what it was. A round man strode down the median, ostensibly Face-Timing on his phone, though from the way he was behaving I think the phone was an excuse. He was very loud. He was gesturing. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, if it made any sense. He walked down to Chestnut Street and to the break in the median, then turned around and went back, moving fast, occasionally shrieking.

Three boys, maybe eleven years old, ran down the sidewalk past the bus shelter. They ran into Broad Street, turned around, and wagged their rear ends at the traffic waiting at the light, then darted back to safety before the light even changed.

Several people crossed at Chestnut on skateboards. They weren’t very good.

When my bus was a minute away, I stood up, and when it drifted up, I snagged the high seat just behind the driver, where I’m guaranteed to be able to get out of the bus even if it gets crowded. A woman with a double-wide baby carriage got on and tipped some front seats back against the side of the bus to make room for the carriage. The foreign couple got on my bus, too; the man had a goatee and a slightly caved-in profile.

Then two more people got in and stood in the narrow entry, where they could best obstruct anyone trying to move back; this is normal. People seem to like to lean against the poles, to pretend that they are not going to be on for long, most often young men, but occasionally young women. Sometimes someone very old does that, because they are only taking it a few stops and don’t want to risk walking to their seats while the bus is moving; I forgive the old people, but not the others. Every once in a while the driver yells at someone blocking the entry, and is ignored.

Sometimes I think about what will happen if the economy goes even further down. The transportation system is already underfunded and short of drivers. The waits are long, the buses are full, cancellations are frequent, and the drivers are often less experienced. All those people hoping they can get where they are going will struggle.

The young professionals will just keep spending money on private cars, whether their own or someone’s ride-share vehicle, and they won’t notice. They are scared of public transportation.

I will be all right too, I remind myself. I had walked to Center City from my house that morning, and I could walk back just as easily. It’s my secret superpower, that I don’t need wheels yet; I walk everywhere.

It’s just that I like taking the bus. It’s an adventure, every time. And today, this bus takes me right to the end of my block, where I slip out and wander home with my shopping, get to my house, walk in, and call, “Louie, I’m home!” as my portly cat stares nervously from the second floor down the stairs at me and then trots down, burbling with relief that I still exist.