Just a few thoughts while riding along in the Bx7 bus

No longer able to avoid medical appointments after two years in which I visited no doctors, in the past several months I have consulted medical professionals in the Washington Heights campus of Columbia Presbyterian.

I get there via the Bx7 bus, on a long ride that begins on Riverdale Avenue off West 236th Street, and ends on West 166th Street off Broadway.

Since I do not own a cellphone and avoid reading on the bus for fear of getting dizzy, I have enjoyed what has become for me unusual periods in which I do nothing but observe and cogitate.

One day, while letting my mind wander as I watched the scene passing by outside my window on the bus, I suddenly realized that while many children dream of becoming teachers — or firemen, or policemen, or astronauts, or ballet dancers, or doctors, or nurses, or baseball players — I had never heard of any young person dreaming of someday opening a nail salon, or a delicatessen, or a barbershop, or a jewelry store, or a café, or a tattoo parlor, or a dress shop, or a flower shop, or a pet shop, or any other kind of retail outlet.

Yet surely the proprietors of those stores had fulfilled a dream as adults. Albeit, for some, their accomplishment may be only temporary, as the abundance of shuttered shops on Broadway sadly demonstrates, many such establishments fail.

For me, watching people anywhere is endlessly fascinating. Since I know nothing about the people on the bus except whatever they look like at that moment, and whatever I may be able to deduce from a smidgen of their behavior, a world of possibilities about them opens up for me. On a recent Tuesday, I found myself wondering about how one 30-ish woman had gained enough confidence to wear a dress whose hem reached only halfway down her massive tree-trunk thighs, and why, although she wore several gold nose rings, she did not have pierced ears.

And why did the elderly lady with turquoise toenails wear an expression that might have illustrated the idiom “the cat that swallowed the canary”? And why, unlike the friend sitting next to her, did she not wear a mask?

My most delightful fellow rider was an enormous-eyed terrier whose head poked out of the oversize handbag on the lap of its mistress, who periodically caressed it lovingly. What was the story behind that sweet tableau? The dog’s owner and I exited the bus together, so I approached her, exclaiming at the terrier’s adorableness.

I learned that this canine, named Sasha, is a therapy animal for her daughter, a young girl who recently lost both her father and a grandmother.

Enjoying the sight of people peacefully going about their lives as bus riders and pedestrians reminded me of something I read in one of the books I have mailed to my grandson, who recently graduated from college — books that contain widely disseminated commencement addresses by such people as the writers David Foster Wallace, Ann Patchett, George Saunders and Carl Hiaasen.

As commencement speakers, each avoided uttering bromides and offered refreshing and appealing ideas and suggestions — appealing and refreshing to me, at least. When my grandson graduated from high school, I sent him a letter with advice that, unfortunately, nobody ever gave me, about not being afraid to take risks and how much you can learn from your mistakes. I ended it with words about those truths from people including Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.

But for his college graduation I decided simply to let people far wiser than I advise him.

In “10-1/2 Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said,” author Charles Wheelan — an economics professor who has studied happiness — wrote about the round-the-world trip he and his girlfriend (and future wife) took right after they graduated from college, much to the consternation of his parents, who were horrified that he wouldn’t immediately enter the corporate world or otherwise draw a salary.

The highlight of their trip was a hike up a mountain in India, starting before dawn, where from the summit they were assured that as the sun rose, they would see an incredibly beautiful panorama.

When they reached the summit, though, they could barely even see each other through the fog that surrounded them.

But as they had hiked, they had passed villages where people were beginning their day as farmers, shopkeepers, homemakers or laborers, and the sight and sounds of their fellow humans going about their everyday tasks had captivated them and remained more vivid in their memories than anything else they saw on their travels.

I won’t pretend that the sight of the nose-ringed woman or toenail-painted lady captivated me, but Sasha the dog did — in spades. And I have no doubt that I will remember all of them forever.