In this blog I want to tell bus stories. I have been a bus driver for public transit for 23 years. I got the idea for a blog the other day, when one of my passengers told me about how a drunk driver had plowed into his 1960 Corvair and four other parked cars. His empty Corvair was totalled. Now, he says, he's just waiting for the guy to get out of prison (three years) so he can KILL him! A couple of other drivers reassured me that he will probably cool down in three years' time. Let's hope so. But who knows, three years from now I may read a newspaper article about a guy who was murdered over a 1960 Corvair, and I'll say, "THAT GUY RODE MY BUS!" Stranger things have happened, and I've seen my share of them.
The other day a lady who walked with a cane got off my bus at the courthouse. Another passenger told me, after she got off, that she was attending the trial of the guy who had allegedly murdered her son four years ago. Suddenly I flashed back to another day, about four years ago. A lady in a motorized wheelchair often rode my bus to the Mesa College stop. That day, as I was strapping down her wheelchair, I casually asked her how she was today. She replied, "Not so good. My son was shot and killed last night." He was one of a set of twins, only 18 years old. It happened in the parking lot of College Grove Shopping Center. I read about it later in the paper. My question to her was this. "WHAT are you doing here?" I can't imaging losing a child one day and going to work the next. I can't imagine functioning at all if that happened in my life. I think I would just curl up into a fetal position and cry, like, forever. But she said going to work kept her mind occupied, and made it easier to cope with. Since it's never happened to me, I won't argue. Doing MY job doesn't take your mind off anything. It gives you plenty of time to dwell on things and brood. (More on that another time.) But here she was, four years later, attending the trial of her son's alleged killer. She no longer used a wheelchair; she had progressed to a cane. I didn't recognize her from before, nor did she recognize me, but I'm sure it was the same woman. No point to this story, really, except for this: Bus driving is a trip, an absolute trip.
As for the other guy, the one who wanted to kill the Corvair killer, I wonder if I will run into him years down the road and find out if he ever followed through. Maybe I'll meet him on the way to see his parole or probation officer. Maybe I'll just see the article about it in the paper. Most likely he'll get over it. It's a car, after all, not a child.