There were two guys named Steve. One became Portsmouth Steve, the other Wampanoag Steve. It depended on where they came aboard.

Lynn was named stewardess. On Doughnut Thursday, she did the serving.

At Christmas, they decorated the front of the bus. There were cookies, candy canes, eggnog. They drew each others’ names for gifts. The maximum allowed for a gift was a buck. The Dollar Store made out.

There were no assigned seats, not officially. Unofficially? Uh, excuse me, but that’s Bob’s seat.

It was probably five years that they all rode the RIPTA bus that came out of Newport in the early morning, rolled up East Main Road through Portsmouth, over the Mount Hope Bridge, through Bristol, Warren and Barrington and into downtown Providence.

The ride was more than an hour for some. They formed a rolling society that started the day warmly.

“You got on the bus and you just started talking to people,” says Essie Hembree, who is office services manager at Hinckley, Allen & Snyder.

When Hembree’s grandchildren were born, people on the bus knew about it. They knew about weddings and new jobs and the other stuff of life shared among friends brought together by the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.

It’s a part of public transportation seldom mentioned in the debate over budgets, cutting routes, curtailing service. But there are a whole bunch of buses taking people to work and bringing them home and providing the chance to do some talking.

The group with whom Essie Hembree rode to work gradually grew smaller. There were job changes and schedule changes. But they have exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Life on the bus has been too good to let the connection be broken.

And on Dec. 21, they will get together again. They will meet at 3:45 in the afternoon at Portsmouth Plaza and walk up to Bob Baynes’ house.

It was late last year that Baynes was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. And it was early this year that he told his fellow bus passengers.

Baynes also did something extraordinary. He started a blog to talk about ALS and what it does to a person. His friends from the bus and anybody else can check in at 360.yahoo.com/sy29272 and learn in an easy, conversational way how a cruel disease progresses.

“I thought for a little change of pace I would talk about being paralyzed. I have always wondered what someone’s life is like when they are paralyzed; of course now, I am experiencing just that. The difference between my paralysis and others is that most people experience a traumatic injury which causes immediate paralysis. Mine is much more gradual and it allows me to observe how the various muscles and nerves behave as I become more paralyzed.”

It is a hard piece of news delivered for easy consumption. Baynes shows a wonderful ability to let us into his increasingly restricted world without a trace of self pity.

So his old RIPTA friends can check in via blog. And on Dec. 21, they will check in at the front door with some Christmas carols, followed no doubt by some stories from the days of Doughnut Thursday and eggnog on the road.

“Since Bob can no longer come to us, we have decided to go to him,” says Essie Hembree, “to share one more wonderful moment with our good friend and let him know that he is in our thoughts and prayers.”

It all started on a bus.

bkerr@projo.com