But Did You Copyright Your Life, Sir?

I was waiting at the bus stop on Van Ness and Eddy, having utilized an app to store my luggage at a convenience store after checking out of an AirBnB in the Mission. My iPad was downloading the National Park Service regional guide as I kept an eye on the time. I was there to catch the Marin County #130 bus to Sausalito, where I’d board the Muir Woods shuttle. I’d come to San Francisco to escape the Labor Day weekend heat for somewhere I could be outside to enjoy the last gasp of summer.

“Excuse me,” mumbled an old man as he reached for a button near me. He pushed it, and a robotic voice announced all the upcoming bus arrivals.

The old man had Santa hair and beard, one drooping eyelid, a grizzled face, and short fingers. His hands were filthy, under his nails blackened with dirt. I caught a whiff of unwashed clothing, but not too bad. He might be unhoused, I thought, but not unclean. Perhaps he was a laborer past his days of useful work, or maybe an old hippy down on his luck.

He wandered away for a minute, then returned to push the button again.

“It’s hard to remember,” he said. I nodded, and he sat down a few seats away from where I was reading the Muir Woods chapter.

“Can a computer write a book?” He asked me.

I thought for a second. Where was this going? I decided to answer honestly.

“Yes,” I said. “But not necessarily a good book.”

The answer satisfied and engaged the old man, who seemed to find my response indicative of my being perhaps a kindred soul.

“I love Shakespeare,” he said. “The greatest playwright who ever lived. I remember when I was finally able to read him without the footnotes. I read a lot. Do you read a lot?”

“Not as much as I used to.” I decided to skip the supporting explanation, that I’d once had free time but now I had an all-encompassing career that left little time for pleasure reading.

He told me he’d read a lot more modern writers until one of them turned out to be writing a fictionalized story of the old man’s life.

“Most fiction is based in reality,” I said. “Just all jumbled up and rearranged.”

“And now I don’t like that writer so much,” he explained. He didn’t tell me who the writer was, or why he might have been writing about the old man next to me at the bus stop.

“It’s hard to read modern work after reading good work. After Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, it’s almost like what is the point.”

He fell silent for a minute.

“Plus, I realized no one is writing about the present.”

I sat and thought for a beat, contemplating what he’d said and trying to figure out how to respond.

The #49 bus pulled up. A #49 bus had come along a few minutes earlier, but the old man had ignored it. Now he decided to board.

“Have a good day,” said the old man as he stood up. As he walked to the bus door, he talked back at me over his shoulder.

“It was nice talking to you. You must be an educated lady.”