Mona Lisa

Art is a wonderful thing.  Museums are dedicated to it around the world.  Here in Cleveland, I can think of two withing walking distance of each other alone.  I pass them both whenever I ride the Healthline (how's that for a segue?).

The oddities that occur on the bus have become so common that they almost seem normal, and although even today a man was yelling and trying to sell bus tickets simultaneously, I'm going to tell you a story of something truly unusual that happened a couple months ago on my way to school.

The bus was fairly vacant that morning. I was sitting in an open area, with two other girls about my age in the vicinity.  We got to a stop, and the population of the bus practically doubled. A man and a girl got on, talking to each other. I assumed they knew each other.  As they sat down across from me, I realized that the man was doing most of the talking, and the girl didn't seem to know him, or how to react in that situation. She wore an elephant hat.

Out of his giant bag resting in the middle of the isle, the man pulled out a sketch pad and pencil.  He started sketching the girl, and talking furiously, about something of apparently no import.  Skeptical and curious, the other onlookers and I watched him draw, expecting it to be terrible. Surprisingly, it was a very good semblance of the girl. I was impressed; the man obviously had some kind of untreated mental illness, but he also had talent. On my iPod a song came on that I'd gotten as an iTunes free download of the week that I'd never listened to before. It was called "Mona Lisa" by Atlas Sound. Usually I skip it, but the coincidence was so funny I didn't. It's actually a decent song.

 His stop came just as he finished the drawing. As he was fumbling to put his stuff back in his giant bag, I caught a glimpse of the contents. Inside the bag was a giant tank of propane, or something in a similar container.  The doors opened, he wrote his number on the corner of the drawing, told the girl to come in to his studio for a free drawing, yelled at the bus driver to keep the doors open, and got off the bus.