The one thing I’ve never been able to do on the bus is sleep. Well, technically there are a lot of things I’ve never been able to do on the bus: microwave fish, run even a one-star hotel, or star in a Broadway musical, but even when I was taking a Greyhound bus from Nashville to Evansville on a regular basis, a four-hour round trip that I sometimes made really late at night, I couldn’t sleep. Now I have no problem falling asleep. In fact I can relate to Kristine at Mum Revised who said, “Waking up is hard to do.” In fact it’s disturbing that I can sleep almost anywhere. I’ve been known to fall asleep in hard-backed chairs in noisy sports venues—not while anything was going on, but because nothing was going on. I can fall asleep so easily I used to be naïve enough that I envied insomniacs until I learned that some of my friends are insomniacs and I’ve seen how hard that can be for them. The stress of insomnia can get so bad you can lose sleep over it, but that’s another story.
The other day when I was on the bus there was a guy in the very back sound asleep. I’m surprised he wasn’t snoring. He was completely out of it and I wondered, what happens if the driver goes past his stop? Maybe he’d do what I’ve done sometimes in heavy rain and just ride the bus to the end of the line and then get off at the right stop on the way back. Then the driver stopped.
“Hey!” he yelled. A few people looked around. “This is your stop!” he yelled again.
Then he got up, walked to the back of the bus, and tapped the guy on the knee and said, “Come on, wakey wakey, this is your stop.”
The guy rolled over, slowly opened his eyes, stretched, yawned, and ambled off the bus.
I think the least he could have done is thank the driver for the wakeup call.
The least I can do, Chris, is thank you for another funny and fabulous post.
I wish I could do more than just offer my sincere gratitude for yet another amazing comment.
No kidding!
Actually, Matt falls asleep on the bus all the time. He’s a pretty light sleeper though. No one’s ever wakened up, nor has he ever missed his stop.
That’s an amazing talent to be able to sleep on the bus and never miss a stop. If I could do that I’d do a lot more napping.