Socrates sat in the right front aisle seat of a scarlet and gold colored Crenshaw bus, almost next to the driver. Someone in the seat directly behind had just taken a swig of gin. The woman sitting next to him had the smell of cigarettes coming off of her clothes. And there were other odors. Faint vapors of urine wafted from an elderly woman dressed in rags that seemed almost as old as she. She was seated a few rows back, across the aisle from a man with a Rastafarian hairdo who was listening to earphones with the volume set so high that everyone in the front third of the bus could sing along to the repetitive rants of the hip-hop selections he played. The contained atmosphere of the one quarter-full bus also carried the smells of a fresh cheeseburger, lemon scented disinfectant, various perfume oils, and the clean scent of a baby suckling at the breast of a brown skinned Hispanic woman two rows toward the rear. Socrates wondered what to make of it all. In his imagination he became a dog that could detect scents a hundred times better than a human being.
