BUS STORY # 472 (Shorts 41)

Seen among the PSAs on an ABQ RIDE bus. Photo by Busboy.

***

These days, a lot of girls are wearing jeans with worn-out areas on both thighs. But you can tell they’re fake. The areas are symmetrical, the edges aren’t raggedy, the mesh is nice and tight, and the jeans are dark blue. But this morning, there’s an old guy wearing the genuine article: faded out jeans with a pair of holes with ragged edges and the web of threads irregular and gapped. And the holes aren’t over his thighs, either. They’re under his back pockets.

***

A girl on crutches takes the bench seat in the front. She looks like a college kid. The guy across the aisle looks like he’s rounded 60. Full head of curly gray hair. Nicely dressed. He points to her scar, visible when her crop jeans rode above her knee when she sat down, and asks her how long since her surgery. A month. He tells her he had a replacement seven years ago. The guy sitting in the first row tells him he had both his knees done 12 years ago. They start trading stories: the 12-years guy had his done two weeks apart at UNMH; the seven-year guy at Pres, and both at the same time. They move on to share other surgical milestones. The girl, meanwhile, has pulled out a paper and pulled it close to her face. But I can see her face behind the paper, and she is grinning like she’s amused by these two old guys matching their surgeries with one another, and delighted to have been displaced from the conversation so early on.

***

Driver to the kids getting off at the stop for Cesar Chavez Community School:
“No fighting. No talking back. Straight A’s. And let the little guys in first, OK?”
Rider, after the kids have exited: “You think they’re gonna listen?”
Driver: “Well, somebody’s got to tell them. They’re not getting this at home, or else they wouldn’t be going to school here.”
Pause. Driver continues:
“I didn’t listen when I was their age. But I didn’t get in any serious trouble. I guess I did listen to my Mom some.”
Pause.
“My mom was the best, easy going…I was a rough kid.  But I didn’t kill anybody, never spent any time in jail.  I only got one ticket, when I was 18.”

***

The bus has taken on some passengers and is starting to pull away from the stop when a rider from the back calls out, “Someone is running!”  The driver stops.  Sure enough, a woman in a uniform of some kind goes running past our windows to the front door.  Two of us look at the rider who called out and say at the same time, “Nice catch.”  We all laugh, and the other rider adds, “We’ve all been there.

BUS STORY # 471 (A Small Miracle)

Wait! Photo by Busboy.

I’m visiting a friend across town. He doesn’t get out much for a number of health reasons, one of them an old football injury to the hip which has left him slow and hobbled. I go over on occasion and we go to the Nature Center or the small park by the Paseo del Bosque trailhead and slowly stroll between sits for a couple of hours. He gets exercise, we get companionship, and our wives get some respite.

This time, we’re not going to the Nature Center. He’s a week past getting over the flu, and his wife doesn’t think he’s ready to tackle that walk. But she does think a walk to a nearby park would be good. We’re doing that.

It’s a lovely day, really, the sun ducking in and out of soft white clouds; no wind; not too warm or too chilly. We walk across the grass for a bit. He pokes at litter with his cane and I pick it up. We deposit it at the various trash receptacles along the fence line of the park.

Later, we sit on a bench beside a playground and watch the elementary school kids at recess across the street. Recess is more organized than in our day. The kids run a lap around the field, then break into organized groups, some involving soccer balls, some bats and what we think are whiffle balls.

We follow a patrol car to the end of the street where it turns around, then parks. We watch a woman power walking, another walking a dog.

“We’re gonna get wet,” he says. He points with his cane to the sky in the northwest. Sure enough, the clouds over that way are a large dark gray mass. We watch for a bit; they are moving our way.

I am not particularly worried. When it comes to rain, Albuquerque is often a tease. We average between roughly seven to 10 inches a year, depending on where in the city you’re measuring. We’re two months away from monsoon season, and even monsoon season’s rainclouds are often much ado about nothing more than a couple minutes’ worth of sprinkles, if that.

I don’t get worried until it starts to rain.

It starts as occasional drops. Then the wind comes up for a few minutes, then the drops start falling more frequently. We take refuge under a platform with a tube slide. I stand on the side where the rain slants in and worry not just about his getting wet, but about how his wife will feel about his getting wet, especially when he’s freshly recovered from the flu.

The rain slacks off in a few minutes.

“You think we ought to head for home now?” he asks.

It’s a risk. We might have seen the worst of it, or we might have seen the sparse advance. But I can tell he’s ready to make a go of it. We start home.

We’re just out from under our shelter when I see a city bus pull up where we entered the park. I am dumbfounded. I have no idea what bus this is, no idea any bus came down this particular street. I think it would be wonderful to catch that bus, but it will be long gone by the time it will take us to get there.

The raindrops remain occasional; the bus remains where it is. We keep walking.

Eventually, I can make out the signage on the side of the bus: the lights alternately spell out “Rio Grande” and “12th Street.” I’ve ridden this route exactly one time, back in 2006. We are several blocks off Rio Grande, so I’m guessing this is part of a loop turnaround for this bus. And that is when it occurs to me the driver might be sitting there waiting for the scheduled start time to come around.

I don’t say anything. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to get my friend’s hopes up. Or maybe I don’t want to jinx whatever outside chance we have of getting to the bus before it needs to leave.

We walk slowly. The rain sprinkles. The bus stays still.

As we get closer still, I can see the driver eating his lunch. I resist the urge to speed up; I’d leave my friend behind, and then make the bus wait. Neither of these options is good. If we make it, we make it. If we don’t, así es la vida.

It seems like a miracle, but we actually reach the bus stop before he pulls away. The driver has been watching us, and he opens the door. I recognize him; I wrote a bus story about him back in 2012, when he was driving the 50. (You can read that story here.)  I tell him he may have saved us from getting soaked.

He laughs and says it wasn’t supposed to rain today.

I ask him if he stops anywhere near the elementary school which is a very short walk from my friend’s home. He says he pulls right up in front of it. I tell him we’ll take it.

He kneels the bus for my friend. I help him up, then to the bench seat, then come back to pay the fare. I put in a dollar for my friend, then pull out my bus pass.

“You don’t need that,” he says. “You’ve already paid for the both of you.”

I am momentarily puzzled.

“It’s 35 cents,” he explains.

Of course! I’m tempted to kid with him: how’d you know we were seniors? But I don’t.

I take a seat beside my friend. The driver finishes his lunch. While we are waiting, the rain starts coming down harder. It’s a pretty good rain, but, characteristically, it peters out after a couple of minutes. Being on the bus instead of out in the street seems like an extension of the miracle of the bus being there in the first place.

Our stop is the next stop. The driver kneels the bus again. When we get out, it isn’t raining anymore. We both thank the driver and wait for him to drive off. I notice the bus stop sign for the first time.

When we get back to his house, we don’t mention the rain or the bus. We’ve already had our miracle; no sense pushing our luck.

BUS STORY # 470 (Judging A Book By Its Cover)

Photo by Busboy

It’s not that I haven’t learned this lesson before.

I’m watching a young couple with two children board the bus. He looks like a gang-banger -- big clothes, oversized flat-billed baseball cap, and a lot of tough-looking tattoos.

She has a tattoo herself, something that looks like an elaborate roseate cathedral window filling the space between the open scoopneck of her blouse and her throat.

The older kid is maybe five, with a military haircut -- shaved sides, close-cropped on top -- but with a small shock of long hair at the back of his neck.

The other kid is an infant, brought on board in a large baby buggy.

Mom and the older kid take the forward-facing seat behind the driver. Dad is looking for a lever that will raise up the bench seat on the passenger side. He’s clearly planning to park the buggy in the spot used by wheelchair riders.

But he can’t figure out the seat, so he asks the bus driver for help.

The driver turns to look at him, at the seat, and you can see from his expression that he doesn’t want to be dealing with this. “This” being what we both anticipate will be Dad’s reaction when he explains to Dad that raising the seat is for wheelchair riders, and ABQ RIDE policy is that all strollers must be vacated and folded up during the ride. A policy which is sometimes cited, and sometimes not, the latter possibly because the driver isn’t interested in a fight or in being the heavy by making the difficult situation of traveling with children even more so.

That anticipated reaction doesn’t come. Instead, Dad turns back to the buggy and lifts the infant out of it, holds it in front of him -- I think it’s a boy -- and smiles, gives him a big kiss, then hands him to mom. It’s a gentle exchange.

Then he tries to collapse the stroller. Tries and tries and tries. He doesn’t lose his temper, or even show any outward sign of irritation. But he has no luck.

His wife asks him to take the infant and she’ll try to make the stroller collapse. I’m thinking she is essentially offering to succeed where he has failed, in front of him and the rest of us. I am thinking this is a machismo minefield, and that either she’s not thinking or else she knows her man well.

I can see the red button on the handle that she presses over and over and over while pushing down on the frame. She has no more success than her husband. She sits back down.

I expect them to give up, but dad hands the infant back to his wife, then goes after the stroller again. I’m thinking they’re gonna reach their stop before they get the thing collapsed.

He moves his hand down one of the wheel supports and just like that, the stroller folds up. He stacks it in front of the window seat on the passenger side, and takes the aisle seat.

The older boy wants his mom’s attention, and he gets it. I can see her bend down to his level, face to face, both of them smiling and talking. Dad suggests he hold the infant, and she hands it off, then resumes her interactions with her son.

Dad holds the infant high in the air, brings him down and kisses him with a loud “mwumph.” He does this several times. The infant’s face looks happy.

A little later, I see Mom and Dad talking across the aisle to one another. They are quiet, respectful of one another.

They’re still on board when I get to my stop. I head down the cross street for where my transfer will be pulling up. When I sit down on the bench, I think about what I saw, about how surprised I was, and why.

What I saw was a considerate, well-behaved, attentive family. I was surprised because I saw the gang-banger clothes and tattoos.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get past this business of “judging a book by its cover.” That’s what my grandmother called jumping to conclusions about a person based on his or her appearance.

On the other hand, she also used to say “Birds of a feather flock together.” If I’ve bought into the stereotype of thuggish menace modeled in hip hop video and cop show television, so have millions of not-inner-city and not-black youngsters who’ve adopted “gangsta style.” Couple that with a steady news stream of gang violence and it is difficult not to make the association between the style and the behaviors -- at least as a first impression.

But my experience is these behaviors are the exception. Most of the time, I see the style in kids who are, at worst, thoughtless -- that is, normal teenagers. Half a century ago, someone my age might have looked at a kid with long hair and seen an anti-American bomb-throwing radical hippie Communist.

I don’t want to be that kind of old man.

BUS STORY # 469 (Cathy’s Bus Story # 1: In Italy, You Can Get There From Here -- On The Bus)

Downloaded from *Logged*: Cinque Terre -- Day 17

My two cousins took a trip to Italy together, and recently, one of them described their adventures which happened to include a charming bus story.

They had taken the train to the town of Cinque Terre with the name and a picture of the hotel they had booked back in the States. When they got off the train, they didn’t see any bus stops, but they did see a long row of taxis. They had hoped to avoid the taxis because they understood the fare would be expensive. But with no alternate transportation in sight, they decided to bite the bullet.

However, when they went over to the taxi stand, there was no one around. Cathy figured it must be siesta time. She had her sister go back into the train station to ask about other transportation. When her sister came back, Cathy asked her what she had found out.

“I couldn’t understand a word she said.”

As if on cue, a bus pulled up in front of them. Cathy went to the front door and showed the driver the picture of their hotel. The driver shook his head “no.” Unfortunately, Cathy spoke no Italian and the driver no English. Once they both realized further efforts to communicate were hopeless, the driver closed the door and pulled away.

And then stopped.

The driver was waving them back to the bus. After a brief debate between the sisters (“It doesn’t go there.” “He wants us to come.”), they went to the front door. He motioned them aboard, and they boarded. They eventually ended up at a place with a well-marked bus stop and the driver indicated they should get out here.

Cathy remembers their bus had a letter rather than a number, and that the bus stop had a list of the buses that stopped there. Their driver’s bus letter was not on that list.

When the next bus came, they again showed the picture of the hotel to the driver, and he motioned them aboard. A co-rider who spoke some English directed them to stay on the bus when they got to the stop where everyone got off.

This they did.

And, sure enough, when the bus finally resumed it’s route, a long and winding uphill climb brought them to the front door of their hotel.

Cathy says she is sure the first driver left his regular route to get them to the bus stop where they could get to where they were going.

She loves Italy.

BUS STORY # 468 (There’s Ladies And There’s Maybe’s)

Cloud Strife, from Final Fantasy VII; downloaded from Giant Bomb

The doors have just shut, and the bus starts pulling away from the stop when we catch sight of the girl running past our windows toward the front door. Several of us call out to the driver who starts to stop, then realizes he’s out into the intersection. He reaccelerates and there is a kind of collective groan. She was so close!

But once he clears the intersection, he pulls over to the curb and waits. We wait till she crosses the street and runs to the door. She trips over a raised concrete block in the sidewalk, but she stays upright and moving.

Once inside, we can see her thanking the driver, then paying her fare. When she walks down the aisle, it’s as if she senses we were pulling for her. Or maybe the driver told her we’d raised the alarm for her. In any case, she does the figurative wiping of the sweat from her brow: “That was close!”

When I reach my stop, I go forward rather than exit through the rear door. I thank the driver for waiting for the girl. He starts chuckling, then says, “It wasn’t anything.” I head out the door.

As luck would have it, I catch the same driver on the return trip. He laughs when he sees me and says, “Hello, again.” After I swipe my card, he says, “You know that girl that almost missed the bus?”

Sure I do.

“Well, she wasn’t a girl.”

“You’re kidding.”

He says he thought it was a girl, too, until “she” stayed by the till after paying the fare to thank him. “It was obvious then,” he said.

He chuckles. It’s a good guy’s chuckle.