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There's a man who rides the 74 whom I would really like to paint. There are three seats that face sideways at the front of the bus, and he stretches out on them, puts his cap down over his face, and takes a nap for our traverse from the Valley to Spokane. I was about to sneak a picture of him on my phone when we stopped.

Three blind people boarded the bus. The first was a black man with a long white cane. He had a narrow chin and long nose. He had chiseled features and reminded me of a pharaoh.

He waved his cane back and forth, checked for people's feet, and promptly sat on my man with the cap.

The three blind people then sat on the three seats across from the no-longer-sleeping man who was looking at them with a kind of wonder.

The girl next to the pharaoh was pale and had brown hair loosely pulled into a French braid down her back. The two leaned close into one another to talk, and I realized eventually that they were holding hands.

My sleeping man has brown eyes, I found out. And the two of us stared at the blind couple. The man kept combing a hand through his hair, and from the way they spoke it didn't look like it could have been above a murmur. It surprises me how much affection I see at the Plaza or on the bus, between people who are not conventionally attractive -- they are heavy or dirty or simply funny lookin. But this was the first time it felt like I was watching a couple where appearance actually didn't matter. And I've never seen intimacy more transparently.