Slow Passing Time

The cable runs along the top of the windows, looped in segments of a couple of feet, and it ties into an electrical sensor that, when pulled, generates a light on the dash of the bus, a message of "Stop Requested" across the scrolling light board hanging from the ceiling, and (if you're lucky) an imperative voice that says "Stop Requested!". You have to pull this cable before the stop or else you walk back to where you were supposed to get off. If you pull this cable after someone else has already triggered the response, which happens to a lot of non-observant earphone-clad riders, you get nothing except looks from other people. The handicapped riders have their own special button that sits on their laps. Sometimes the cable doesn't work on one side or the other and you have to get folks on the opposite side of the bus, the side that has a working cable, to pull it for you when you need to stop. The cable is like the reigns of a great, white rectangle of a horse. It, indeed, does arrest the forward motion generated by harnessed horsepower.

When we get past the last bus stop before my stop, inches after we cross the threshold of stopping so as to commit no confusion to the driver, I grab that cable. Sometimes others beat me to the pull, but mostly I make the driver stop at the next possible, allowable stop. I need not even grab the damn cable; all drivers know my routine. I've fallen asleep on the way home, late at night after being out at some bar with unfamiliar singing folks or wrapped up in indecency of some sort, and the driver will ask a rider to nudge me and idle impatiently until I rise-mumble incoherant gratitude-and exit. But in the coherant, bladder-filled afternoons usually I grab the cable and immediately put my travel bag over my shoulder as I walk to the front. I like my bus drivers. Bus drivers put up with a LOT of bullshit on their marches back and forth over their routes, like junkyard dogs they are in their protective zones, but also like patient hippos ferrying dull-witted, lazy birds on their unconcerned back they tend to glide to and fro.

I talked to the driver, my better driver friend (the drivers alternate), and told him that I won't be seeing him so much anymore. He asked why and I told him I was going to finally do it, I'll be buying the Rusty Turd this weekend. After I explained the price and condition and history of the truck, he countered that I might still be seeing him more than I thought...and he might be right. We smiled, I departed while wishing him luck, and the bus moved on in a roar and bustle of movement.

I went into the same old store, the one closest to my house which causes me to walk a mile home after the bus drops me off, and I thought: "Life is moving onward. I'm to the point where I'm going to miss the bus rides. I'm changing..."