I’m working my way through a book on writing, as one does when one is avoiding writing, and I’m currently reading the chapter about creating characters. The author says one way you can show character is in what happens when one person’s firm expectations and beliefs come into conflict with someone else’s.

I gave up reading and ran to catch the bus, sitting in the senior citizen seats in the front as usual. A few stops later, someone sat down next to me, or rather partly on top of me. I was not taking up any unnecessary space, and they weren’t any bigger than I was, so I didn’t shrink into myself. The next mile or so, the person was slowly shoving their arm against mine, or leaning over and coming back bumping into me, and even at one point tapping my leg. I did not expand or contract. I was there first, you see, and I was not invisible, and I was neither going to fight back nor get up and move. There were plenty of seats. I did at one point, when they were leaning forward, bring down the arm rest between us. Clearly, they wanted me to move, and clearly, I wasn’t going to, and eventually they got off before my stop.

The bus went on its merry way. I stood up as my stop approached, and a young man pushed past me to go address the bus driver. Then he backed up, shoving his back pack right into me, apologizing briefly but not moving, and then he leaned his back firmly against the pole where my hand was holding on. I did not move.

While waiting at the train station in line to board, I got a notification that I had been upgraded, which meant I had a guaranteed seat and didn’t have to wait in line. I stayed there anyway. A conductor came and told us we were lining up wrong, so I walked back where he was waving to us, and I made space for a couple of guys who had been ahead of me in line but didn’t change fast enough. That startled them, because they thought I was rushing to steal their spot. “Okay?” said one of them doubtfully.

On the bus in another city, another young man stood close to me so that his backpack was nearly in my face. I asked him to move, but he didn’t hear me, so I repeated myself and he apologized and moved.

The woman next to me said, “I miss New York 50 years ago, when people used to be polite.”

”They weren’t polite 50 years ago,” I said briskly.

“In like 1975,” she insisted.

“I lived here then,” I told her. “Remember all the locks we had to put on our doors? I didn’t know anyone who didn’t get mugged.”

”Well,” she said doubtfully and stopped talking to me.

I did not say to her that 50 years ago, both she and I were cute and young, and people were awfully nice to us as a result. Now, we’re just sort of invisible, and it makes some of us just a touch peevish and wistful, and the rest of us just determined to continue existing.

And clearly,the character trait revealed by all of this is that I am absolutely, obdurately contrary, and that I consider it a virtue. I remind myself of my damn grandmother at the same age.