A sorry-looking 50-something white woman got onto the bus, carrying a newspaper in one hand and an open can of beer in the other, with a backpack over her shoulder. A few drops of beer slopped out of the can as she walked back, looking for a seat.

She was clearly homeless, with Doc Brown’s hair and also his facial expression. She was alone and deep in conversation with herself, and she took a seat across the aisle from me.She put the newspaper on her lap and sort of read it, but mostly she was marking it with a pen, scribbling furiously. That’s what got my attention, because that’s what I used to do — take notes on any scrap of paper handy, to remind myself what to write later — before I graduated to the hardback notebook I now carry everywhere.So I felt almost a kinship with this messed-up looking woman, and wondered, is she a literary bum like me? To find out, of course, I’d need to see what she was writing.
She was one row in front of me and across the aisle, so I could read the paper’s headlines, and I squinted and tried to read her writing, but no. She was five feet in the distance, just at the point where my sight gets blurry.I kept trying to read whatever she was writing, but she sensed the intrusion, and glanced back at me, so I turned and looked out the bus’s window. La-de-da, la-de-da.When I let myself look again, she’d paused for a swallow of beer, but quickly she put the can on the floor and resumed filling just about every quarter-inch of white space on the front page of yesterday’s Seattle Times. But what was she writing?I thought about boldly asking her, but I hate it when people ask what I’m writing in my notebook. It’s so intrusive, so none of your business, and anyway, she’d glanced back at me a second time, and she looked mean.We were approaching my house, so I rang the bell and stood up, then took a few steps across the aisle to stand by the bus’s back door. This positioned me directly behind her as the bus slowed, and gave me a closer, better-focused view of the newspaper and whatever she was writing all over it.It was numbers — long strings of 12- to 20-digit numbers filling all the margins, with occasional triangles and wavy hieroglyphs I sorta/almost recognized as mathematical symbols, like ⨹ and ≈ and such. She added more numbers while the bus’s brakes squeaked, numbers and numbers all over the news, with glyphs between the numbers.When the bus stopped, I stepped off, wondering, is that woman nuts, or is she on the verge of inventing time travel?

7/11/2023