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Lisa Bubert | Longreads | July 24, 2025 | 3,224 words (12 minutes)
I have always done exactly what I wanted. Which is why I find myself on a shady facial recognition website looking for a bus driver I met when I was 14.
My mother and I had come to Los Angeles for vacation, and we were on one of those “Homes of the Stars” tours that wound through Beverly Hills. This was the first time I’d ever left Texas in any meaningful way, the first time I’d been on an airplane, the only time I would ever see a meal on a domestic flight, though the charm of chicken salad with crackers was lost on me. (At the time, if it wasn’t fried or cheese, I didn’t eat it.)
I don’t remember much about the tour, but I remember the tour guide. I remember he was also the bus driver. I remember he was dark-skinned and had an accent neither of us could place. I remember his name—John. I remember that he was affable, knowledgeable, a great storyteller. I remember that most important of all, he saw me.
Lisa Bubert has written numerous essays and reading lists for Longreads. Her most recent was “Safety Net.”
John talked to me as if I was my own person, not just some star-eyed kid from a small town, but a human with thoughts and ideas of her own. When I asked a question, he gave me a real answer—more than an answer, an elaboration. An invitation to an even deeper question I hadn’t yet thought to ask. By the end of the tour, I was in the seat directly behind him, crouched forward, elbows on my knees, craning forward to catch every word he said, emboldened to carry a conversation, thrilled to be validated with a response.
Looking back now, I see the precarity of the scene: a naive teenage girl enthralled by an older (and yes, handsome) man who showered attention on her. But my mother was there, listening to our conversation, pleased that someone managed to pull me out of my shell. She could sit back and let someone else do the work for once.
In the picture, I am radiant, my smile spread wide.
I don’t remember how the conversation began. Likely, John asked me what I liked to do and I told him I loved to play music. Prior to this trip, I was a shy kid who had struggled to find my place. But while I was terrible at sports and an average student, I was good at music—specifically French horn. I had a natural aptitude for clear tone, an impeccable musical memory, and could read sheet music like a book. Yet, none of that gave me a clear path forward. The adults in my life were all blue-collar: mechanics, farmers, ranchers, my mother a nurse. I saw plenty of country and pop musicians on TV, but I couldn’t play guitar and certainly couldn’t dance. I wasn’t interested in that music, anyway. I was interested in the symphonic, the cinematic. Sweeping scores composed by John Williams and Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman where French horns rang out high and clear. I would sit alone in my bedroom and listen to orchestral pieces and soundtracks, conducting invisible musicians like a bedridden old man at the end of a movie. I was, as my brother reminded me often, a straight-up nerd. And no one other than my mother and my middle-school band teacher found this promising.
Throughout the tour, John talked to me about my musical interests, told me about the paths and possibilities I hadn’t yet been able to see. If I enjoyed playing music enough to want to do it all the time, then why didn’t I just do that? Why not throw myself into that future? What else was I going to do with my time here on earth?
It had never occurred to me, this sense of immense possibility, that I could just do whatever I wanted. I was emerging, my world opening up. When the tour ended, John and I stood outside the bus and took a picture with my disposable camera. In the picture, I am radiant, my smile spread wide.
At home, I kept that little photo in a prime spot on my bulletin board. “Remember what John said,” my mother and I would joke whenever a conversation about music or college came up. That phrase became my version of Nike’s “Just Do It” mantra. It echoed in my head as I auditioned for drum major, for All-State band, for university admissions. It worked: I got into music school. And although music ultimately didn’t become my path, the permission I had received to just do the thing I wanted to do stuck with me.
I packed my picture with John up with my other photo albums, moved them with me from dorm to apartment to house, Texas to Nashville. At some point I forgot exactly what it was that John had said, but I never forgot how he had made me feel—that what I wanted was important, and was important simply because I wanted it.
Twenty years later, I am in an inflatable swimming pool with friends, drinking sparkling rosé and talking about God knows what, when the memory of John and that bus tour emerges from the recesses of my mind.
“The man literally changed the course of my life,” I say.
Up until this, I’d blown my life up several times, course-correcting, attempting to find exactly what it was that made me feel whole in the way we discussed that summer day. I tried music, but I learned that playing music wasn’t what captivated me—it was being in creative conversation, in community, with others. I started writing to fulfill the creative piece and I sought jobs that fulfilled the community piece. Eventually, I became a public librarian and writer. Creative conversations and community abound, and for once I’m at peace with how I spend my days.
“I’ve always wanted to find him,” I say, the words pouring out, loosened by the rosé.
Questions linger in the back of my mind: what it would take to find John, where he might be now, what happened to him after that tour. When we met, my teenage brain clocked him as being in his mid-50s, and that was over 20 years ago. Time marched on; doing the math now, I worry that I waited too long.
“You’d better get on it, then,” my friend says, pouring herself another glass.
Later that week, I pull the little disposable picture out of a dusty photo album. There I am, my Kool-Aid smile; there’s handsome John, his tie swishing as he leans next to me on a city sidewalk, mimosa trees and tour bus in the background. I study the picture for clues and notice two things: 1) I was wrong about John’s age. He was much younger than I realized; and 2) there are no other identifying features in the picture.
No street signs, no signage on the bus. The bus blocks the buildings around it so it’s impossible to recognize any surrounding landmarks. All I have to go on is John, red tour bus, and Los Angeles, which is exactly what I Google, grasping at straws. I try to remember the substance of our conversation to jog loose any other defining characteristics and find none. I’m not even sure I have his name right. Was it really John—or could it be Jon, or Juan, or maybe something else entirely?
I search all the tour bus companies across LA and find one that uses red buses. I text my mom the name to see if it rings any bells. It doesn’t, but she’s glad I’m finally getting around to finding John. I email the company, saying that I know it’s a crazy question but did they ever have a guy working for them in 2002 named John? I attach the picture. I don’t expect to get a response. (I never do.) I ask my mom to dig around in her scrapbooks and shoeboxes to see if she has any receipts or any memorabilia from that trip that might unlock more details. Again, no dice. This single picture with its generic, no-hint-giving background, is all I have.
And then a wicked thought crosses my mind.
I’ve heard about facial recognition search, seedy websites where you can upload a picture of someone and get a possible identification in return. As someone who values personal privacy and abhors the mounting impossibility of not being tracked on the internet without your consent, I’m appalled by these websites. As someone who really wants to locate a stranger I’d met once two decades ago, I’m intrigued. I find the least objectionable-looking website and upload my picture.
I want to say that it’s harder than this, that it takes multiple tries, but no—I hit the search button and the first result that returns is John, 20 years older. Technology, man.
I gasp. It is unmistakably him. A single headshot on a gray background, the same smile. Now that I have this clue, I have to go further.
I want to say that it’s harder than this, that it takes multiple tries, but no—I hit the search button and the first result that returns is John, 20 years older.
However. To access the full search results—meaning the website where this picture of older John lives—I have to pay. In Bitcoin. At this, I draw the line. But I am nothing if not persistent.
I take a screenshot of the updated picture and rerun the search. Bingo: four more results with John in the pictures, one of which carries a blurry photographer’s watermark. I find the photographer’s website; he’s a portrait artist in North Carolina. I click on the link for his gallery and scroll. And there—dozens of portraits of John taken two years prior. And more importantly, a last name.
The search blows open. I learn that John played soccer for a small college in North Carolina in the ’80s, and that much has happened since our chance meeting two decades prior. He was interviewed on a podcast 10 years ago about being a biracial man in America. He has written a short memoir. He’s been a motivational speaker, a youth mentor, a grad student on his way to a doctoral degree. It astonishes me how closely aligned we are: His family, like mine, is from Germany; his ex-wife and I share a name; we both work with kids; we both write. I get the distinct feeling that had we remained in contact, we would by now be old friends.
And yet, he has no website, no Facebook account or any other social media that I can find. I can’t find a way to contact John directly. So I email the photographer, cross my fingers, and wait.
The next morning, an email hits my inbox. The sender appears on the preview line only as “Dr. J.”
“Lisa—Please refresh my memory of how you know me.”
“It’s a long story,” I reply. I send him the picture of us on the LA sidewalk.
We agree to a phone call.
My friends are convinced that this phone call is a terrible idea. Stranger danger, what if he’s a creep, what if he really doesn’t want to be found, what if he’s in hiding, etc. All valid points. But I know in my gut that John is the kind of person who would want to be contacted by someone like me, a serendipitous stranger who just wanted to thank him for the shape of her life. I don’t know why I believe this. Maybe because of how open he was on the bus, how willing to listen and encourage, how interested and curious. But that was 20 years ago. A lot can change in 20 years, especially in the 20 years that birthed the public internet. But can a person with as distinct a personality as John (or as distinct a personality as my child brain remembers) really change that much? Can the world have turned so much that it turned him upside down with it?
I could turn that same question around on me—do I, at heart, possess the same idyllic soul I had when I was 14? I am more guarded, more mature, less star-eyed and more clear-eyed, my youthful optimism giving way to something more embattled. But I still carry that small belief in magical thinking. And, I decide, John probably does too.
Still, my stomach turns over as I dial his phone number. There’s always the chance I could just be delusional. I feel delusional as I listen to the buzzing ring.
Then the ring stops.
“This should be really interesting,” John says, upon answering.
The impact of his voice is immediate. The lilt, the tenor, the accent—it’s as if I’ve been transported to childhood. I gasp. My joy is uncontainable.
“You have no idea what kind of ruckus you caused here,” he says. Something about the hunt he’d gone on to try to figure out who I was, a wild 24 hours spent trolling the internet, looking at my website, reading about me, even calling me from a blocked number (I didn’t pick up) just so he could hear my voice, none of which was recognizable. In the email I sent back to him, I had explained the strange, outsized influence he’d unwittingly had on my life, which he had found hard to believe. He was unsure that I was a real person and not some kind of a scammer. It was his children who convinced him to contact me. So—
“Tell me everything,” he says. “I want to know it all. But first, how in the world did you find me?”
He does remember me, he says. It’s the picture that brings him back, but he remembers that tour, he remembers my mother. He finds it hilarious that he is wearing a tie in the picture: “My children never see me in a tie.” But still, he is flabbergasted that we are both here, now, on two sides of a phone from each other, two decades since the last time we talked.
The lengths to which I’ve gone to find him both amazes and alarms him. He wants to know exactly how I did it, which websites had his information, who I contacted, who contacted me back, a complete map of my journey from picture to this phone conversation.
I stumble over my words, trying to explain myself, my near-maniacal (perhaps delusional!) devotion to finding a stranger. I know it sounds crazy, even creepy, especially when I describe the use of the facial recognition site, especially after he says he’s a “private person” and likes to keep his life wrapped up tight. I apologize. Maybe I’ve overstepped, and his voice will turn angry and he’ll yell and hang up, send me an angry email later.
But no—he stops me. He can tell I’m struggling.
“You do not need to justify any of this,” he says. He assures me that he doesn’t think anything wrong of me—he’s just curious. And this curiosity is what I remember most about him. It’s the part of him that hasn’t changed; it’s the part I value the most.
The impact of his voice is immediate. The lilt, the tenor, the accent—it’s as if I’ve been transported to childhood.
When he says he wants to know everything, he really means everything. He asks about what happened to me after that conversation, did I study music, why did I stop studying music, how did I meet my husband, what is my husband like, is he a good man, what does he think of all this, what does my mother think, by the way, tell my mother he says hello.
We talk for two hours and it is as if we are old friends, interrupting each other’s sentences, loud and flamboyant in our excitement. We get hung up trying to remember how our first conversation started. He is hung up on the how of it all—how I was able to find him, how I remembered all this, how we even originally ended up in conversation on that bus. He is intrigued by the timeline; when we met, he was working as a tour guide and thought maybe he might like to go into teaching or mentorship. At the time, his personal life had been difficult and he was seeking direction. He loves that even then, before his path was clear before him, he made this impression on me. Ultimately, we decide that the conversation happened the way it did because I am me and he is him.
“A teacher knows when a student sits before him,” John says, remarking on my attentiveness that day. He was speaking and I was listening, and vice versa. I tell him that I even remember the way I sat to hear him speak because it was the way I’m sitting now—crouched forward, elbows on knees, hungry to catch every word.
As curious as he is about the how, he’s not at all concerned with the why. The why, he says, he understands. A professor friend of his recently told him that this kind of thing happens often, that “people from the past come through.” I tell him that kind of thing is happening to me too; spending more time as a children’s librarian, I’m starting to experience what John is experiencing right now—random kids who come to you as adults, adults who say that you are the reason for their life’s path.
“That’s all we want as teachers, as mentors,” he says. “To know we were heard. And to be validated by that child, now an adult, calling us out of the blue to tell us of the impact. That is immeasurable.”
It occurs to me that as much as I valued being seen by him all those years ago, he is just now realizing how seen he was by me. It’s like he’s discovered a time capsule he didn’t realize existed, proof that the kernel of his soul has remained intact. I can hear the pride in his voice when I describe the effect the conversation has on me. “That’s always been me,” he says. “That’s who I am.”
I thank him for his role in my life, however fleeting it was. We agree to keep in touch. I order a copy of his memoir and promise to give him my thoughts once I’ve read it. He is excited to see what I’ll write next. He is excited to tell his children about our conversation. As our call dwindles, I sense this will be a long friendship, that it has already been a long friendship, decades in the making.
The world is so odd sometimes, the internet making everything frictionless and small. DNA mapping and global social profiles that make these serendipitous encounters feel so much less enchanting. It is too easy now to look a person up and judge who they are based on their profile online rather than what is immediately before you. Too easy to set our minds wondering on who they are, where they work, what they post about, who they have mutuals with.
But.
There can still be a kid, 20 years after being a kid, sitting with her elbows on her knees, crouched forward, craning to hear every word a stranger says because the stranger is not a stranger. Though there is no online profile between them, one soul recognizes another. A teacher recognizes when a student sits before them.
“Thank you,” John sighs, as we say our goodbyes. “For finding me.”
Lisa Bubert is a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Texas Highways, Texas Monthly, West Branch, Northwest Review, and more. Her Longreads essay “The Sunset” was a Notable inclusion in Best American Essays. Her work has also been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
