Adventures In Busing.

Source: Thursday Review

So I was driving around running a few small errands and listening to a local DJ and marveling that there’s still such a thing as local DJs. We don’t have satellite radio—my wife listens to a lot of audiobooks—and there is at least one “local” station that doesn’t have DJs and even prides itself on not taking requests, but there are at least a couple where you can call in and talk to an actual person which always gives me flashbacks to my high school days when I finally got out of the misery of riding the bus and rode home with friends who had cars and we’d listen to the radio, and then once we got home we’d go in and turn on the radio in the house—running if there was a song we really liked on. Sometimes we’d call up the DJs. It always amazed me that my friends could get into long conversations with DJs, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes. One local station had a promo where they’d play the call of the Tookie bird from George Of The Jungle and if you were the first caller you won something. One time my friend was on the phone with the DJ for about fifteen minutes and he heard it in the background and said, “Hey, I’m the first caller, right?” And the DJ laughed and sent my friend a couple of movie tickets. Every time I called the DJs always cut me off for some reason. Maybe it was my song choices.

“Could you play Hourglass by Squeeze?”

“Yeah, we don’t have that anymore.” Click.

“Could you play Bohemian Rhapsody?”

“We played that earlier this week. It’s too weird to play more than that.” Click.

“Hey, could you play—”

“Sorry, kid, we’re not taking requests right now.” Click.

In college I had a couple of friends who were DJs for the campus radio station. One even put me on the air, briefly, one night. I only announced one song and did a Casey Kasem impersonation. It was pretty good but not good enough. The next day I got a call from the student manager who told me I had to go through training and orientation before I’d be allowed on the air again, so that was the end of my radio career.

Riding the bus home from work I mostly had an iPod then my phone loaded up with songs and podcasts, but for just driving around I still like regular old-fashioned radio. I like the surprise of not really knowing what song is coming up next, even if—sometimes especially if—it’s not a song I’d pick.

Between songs the DJ chattered away and finally I pulled over into a parking lot and called. There was one ring, then two, and then somebody picked up. It didn’t sound like the DJ—maybe they use a different on-air voice—but I just asked if he’d play a song I wanted to hear.

“Okay, maybe, I’ll see if I can find that, it’s a little out there, hey, thanks for calling.” Click.

Well, it was a bit perfunctory but a few minutes later the song I asked for came on.

Over the past year my wife and I have gotten a lot of takeout from local restaurants. It’s our way of doing what little we can to help, and, fortunately, most of our favorite places are still around while too many others have gone out of business. And I do all the picking up rather than using one of the numerous delivery services. I haven’t crunched the numbers but I think more money goes to the restaurant, which is also kind of a family tradition. I had a great uncle who, when his father had a heart attack, called the undertaker. When people asked him why he didn’t call the doctor he said, “I could have but I got a bigger inheritance by cutting out the middleman,” but that’s another story.

I know it’s tough for restaurants even now but there’s one thing I absolutely can’t stand: when I get home and find that something’s been left out of our order. With most things I’m pretty easygoing but finding that something’s missing from a takeout order sends me into a boiling rage, and the worst part is I can’t really do anything about it. I’m not going back to the restaurant because by the time I’ve driven there, picked up the order, and driven home I’m usually cold and hungry and tired, and also they might not believe me when I tell them something was missing. And in fairness to the restaurants I get that. I have a brother-in-law who used to be a general manager at a restaurant that served prime rib on weekends. One Wednesday night someone called in to complain that they’d picked up a to-go order and their prime rib was missing. He said, “Maybe that’s because we’re not serving prime rib tonight.” The caller hung up.

I also get that mistakes can happen although repeated mistakes turn me off a place no matter how good it is. Several years ago my wife and I got sushi from a favorite local place—it was where we had one of our first dates, in fact, and even after it changed hands the food was still good but their takeout service took a nosedive. Our orders were always short and always took longer than they said. If they told me the order would be ready in half an hour it would take at least an hour, and I’d spend most of the extra time standing there in the restaurant like a schmuck. Finally I complained to the manager who said he understood and that they’d gotten a lot of complaints and said the next time our order would be free. The next time there was a different manager on duty who said he’d never heard of any problems but that if I were willing to come in he’d be happy to discuss it. I knew I was getting cold fish and it wasn’t sushi.

Anyway one night I got takeout from a nearby Chinese restaurant and started pulling everything out and was surprised to find things I didn’t order in the bag: egg rolls and extra dumplings. I couldn’t figure it out. It was all in one bag and the receipt with my name and number was stapled to the outside so it wasn’t as though I’d picked up someone else’s order along with mine. I hoped they hadn’t made a mistake and I felt bad about some poor schmuck getting home and not finding his egg rolls. Then I checked the receipt again and written at the bottom was, “Extra dumplings/egg rolls-FREE” right above “THANK YOU!”

Yeah, with that sort of service I will go back—again and again.

Amalie Drive, Nashville. Source: Google Maps

There have been a few kids out sledding down our street which took me back to when I started seventh grade at a new school that was close enough that I could walk home from school. That’s how I found Amalie Drive, a steep hill that seemed perfect for sledding, even though, in late August at the start of the school year, any chance of sledding seemed a long way off. And I’d also outgrown sledding, which is how I know I won’t have a “Rosebud” moment on my deathbed. I might look back wistfully at something else but it won’t be a treasured sled that I left behind when I was whisked away and sent to a boarding school by a wealthy banker, mostly because I never had a treasured sled—I had one but would only get to use it once or maybe twice a year—and also I was never sent to a boarding school.

Amalie Drive may not look like much on Google Maps, although you can see there’s a red British phone booth on the corner that’s been there since phone booths actually had phones in them. It rises gently on one side and then has a drop on the other side that’s so long and so steep I thought it would be perfect for sledding. That’s what I thought one August afternoon as I was climbing Amalie Drive on my way home, and I focused on that rather than Kevin, a school bully who’d tormented me all through sixth grade, and who was coming up Amalie behind me, although he was far enough away that I don’t think he recognized me, or maybe he just didn’t think I was worth the effort of running a quarter of a mile uphill. After that I took a different route home, cutting through yards and woods, and it was not only more scenic but less of a climb and probably shorter than sticking to the road.

As perfect as Amalie would have been for sledding it had, for me, a downside that wasn’t so great. It was far enough away from my house that it wasn’t worth dragging a sled all the way there, especially since I’d also have to drag it back uphill. Besides my next door neighbor’s backyard was almost as good: just past his driveway it sloped downward all the way to my friend Tony’s house, so I could not only sled down to see him but get him to drag the sled back up the hill with me. The neighbor was Mr. Rick, a nice guy who didn’t mind kids playing in his yard as long as we didn’t bother the pot plants he grew on his deck. Then he was killed in an accident while flying his private plane and the house was sold to another guy, Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard didn’t want kids in his yard and sometimes came out and stood on his deck with a drink in his hand and told me I’d better stay away when I was in my own yard, and I wish he’d kept Mr. Rick’s pot plants because he could really use something to mellow him out, but that’s another story.

That winter there was a big snowstorm. Like I said I’d outgrown sledding by that time but apparently Kevin hadn’t. I’m not sure why he came around to my neighborhood—it was a pretty long walk for him even when he wasn’t carrying a sled, but maybe he’d heard about this perfect hill for sledding and decided to give it a try. I was shoveling snow off my driveway. He looked over at me but I was so bundled up I don’t think he recognized me, or maybe he was too interested in sledding to bother me. He perched the sled at the top of the hill and was about to get on it when Mr. Howard stepped out, drink in hand, and yelled, “Hey kid, get out of my yard!”

Kevin’s whole body jerked and he slipped and fell a little bit down the hill.

“Didn’t you hear me?” said Mr. Howard. “Get out of here before I get my gun!”

Kevin had looked like he was about to make a smartass remark but at that threat he picked up his sled and trudged as fast as he could through the snow and left.

I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow finding that funny.

Way back when I was still fairly fresh out of college and was still working at a new job a big snowstorm hit Nashville. It shut down most of the city but my wife and I had a Jeep with four-wheel drive and somehow we made it to work. In case it’s not already clear this was well before cell phones were common, and we hadn’t even gotten e-mail yet, although we did have an electronic interoffice messaging system that, whenever you sent someone a message, would cause everything on their screen to freeze, a brilliant design feature that was conceived by a guy who I’m pretty sure went on to create Windows Vista, but that’s another story. I was especially concerned about getting to work because I was still on probation and thought it might be a crime if I couldn’t do the time, although it turned out I was only one of three people who did make it in that day which I think earned me some bonus points.

I was working away steadily, or maybe steadily sweeping some mines, when the phone in my boss’s cubicle rang. At the time we had a simple phone system that allowed anyone in the office to pick up a call on anyone else’s phone simply by dialing *8, something we can’t do with our new advanced office phones that were designed by the same guy who was responsible for Windows Vista, so I answered. I could tell from the double ring that this was an outside call so I said the department name and added, “How may I help you?” There was a click and a dial tone. Then the phone in my boss’s assistant’s cubicle rang, again an outside call. I picked up again. Click and a dial tone again. Then another phone rang. And another. Every phone rang and each time I picked up and spoke, only to get a click and a dial tone. Finally my own phone rang and a voice I recognized as the head of another department snapped, “Is anyone working there?”

A lot of sarcastic answers, ranging from, “What am I, chopped liver?” to “No, I’m robbing the place and answered the phone just for fun,” to the really off the wall “Bula Vinaka, beachside!” came to mind but instead I just politely said that I was working and asked if I could do anything to help.

“Well everybody else better be in tomorrow!” yelled the department head who had no power over anyone in my office and who, I realized, must have been calling from home and was only calling in to be a jerk.

It’s funny to me to think about that now with Nashville is under a winter storm warning with a predicted two to six inches of snow, which could mean anything from nothing to a foot and a half, but it doesn’t matter if I can’t make it in. I’ve been working from home for eleven months now, and it’s amazing to think how much has changed. The building where I work is open now but the number of people who can come in is limited to three at a time, but, in a sense, we’re all still there. And that department head retired long ago but after that I’d sometimes hear a phone in an empty cubicle ring and I’d wonder who was calling. And I’d just let it go.

People of a certain age will remember this commercial that taught a generation how to say “Hello!” in Fijian.

Several years ago I had a tank full of goldfish in my office at work, and because goldfish have almost no memory I had to hear them telling that “I have no idea how to drive this” joke about every three seconds. Supposedly watching fish in an aquarium can lower your blood pressure, and it was also nice to have something to look at because my office has no windows, although I was also reminded that the work that goes into maintaining an aquarium raises blood pressure. And it didn’t help when the filter stopped working one weekend when I was gone and when I came in on Monday I had more dead goldfish than a carnival ring toss game.

One of the nice things about working from home is I do have a window and for my birthday my wife got me a bird feeder because supposedly watching birds can also lower your blood pressure, and a bird feeder is a lot easier to maintain than an aquarium although I did feel my blood pressure going up a little when no birds came by for several days after I put it up and I thought, hey, what am I, chopped liver? And then I started wondering if I birds would come around if I put chopped liver in the feeder instead of safflower seed, but then a tufted titmouse came to the feeder—a bird I had to identify with my wife’s bird book because, with a few exceptions, I don’t know most birds from Shinola, even though Shinola doesn’t fly, but that’s another story. That also reminds me that my wife and I have a running debate about the birds we see flying around big parking lots. I think they’re seagulls because, well, they look and sound exactly like the seagulls I see at the beach. She says they’re just gulls because we’re nowhere near the sea, but I say we get a lot of tourists from Florida, and besides New Wave rock wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if we just ran away from a flock of gulls.

Here’s a completely gratuitous picture of a pair of great tits:

Source: World Bird Sanctuary

I’ve gotten to know other birds not just from their looks but their behavior. The tufted titmouse and chickadee will fly up to the feeder one at a time, grab a seed, and fly away. House finches will come to the feeder in pairs, usually a male and female, and they’ll sit on the feeder for a few minutes and eat several seeds, and then the female will yell, “YOU’VE HAD ENOUGH, LARRY, GO MINGLE!” and chase the male away. Then there’s the Carolina wren that gets down into the bird feeder and throw seed all around and looks at me and says, “Is this all ya got?” And even though it’s a small feeder I’ve had a female cardinal, and a red-bellied woodpecker who’s at least three times bigger than the other birds and hangs off the feeder looking for chopped liver.

I put safflower seed in the feeder because squirrels don’t like it but no one’s told the squirrels that and I’ve had two come around regularly. I haven’t got anything against the squirrels but it is a bird feeder and when they park their furry butts in it most birds stay away, although I have seen the Carolina wren dive at a squirrel yelling, “YOU’VE HAD ENOUGH, KEVIN, GO CLIMB A TREE!”

Eventually I’m going to have to go back to work and I’ll lose my window so I’ll have to find some other way to keep my blood pressure down. Maybe I’ll get another tank full of goldfish and teach them to drive it.  

When I was in third grade we had a surprise snow day. There had been no snow in the forecast and when I woke up it was bright and sunny—even brighter than usual because there was a thick layer of snow all over everything, including the roads, which even now is enough to shut down the entire city. There wasn’t any word of school closings on the news but how could school not be closed on a day like that? So I bundled up and walked to my friend Troy’s house, at the bottom of the hill. And there, struggling to get through the snow was the school bus. A couple of kids were running to it. I stood there just looking, not sure what to do. The bus sat there chugging at me, its front windows greenish in the glare. It was like I was in an ersatz version of one of those horror films where machines become conscious and start killing people, at least until they run out of gas. In truth I’m pretty sure it was just being driven by Mrs. Owens, the bus driver who two years later would prove her dedication to her job driving bus full of kids home during another surprise snowstorm, this one hitting during the day. After dropping most of us off after eight o’clock that night she’d call every parent to make sure we got home safely.

That morning I was in third grade may not have been as much of a test but she still demonstrated the same level of dedication. Unable to get up the hill where I lived she was still determined to drive as much of her route as she could, and I felt kind of guilty for running away and pretending I’d never seen the bus. This had to be a snow day, I thought. Nature had given us a gift and the kids who weren’t taking it were fools. It was in late January or early February, that null time when school days crept along at a dismal pace, when the distending analemma pulled afternoons from darkness into dull gray, and third grade wasn’t my best year anyway. It was the year I had acute hypochondria and spent so much time in the nurse’s office I became an expert on bandaging other kids’ playground wounds. And earlier that school year—some time in October, I think—some friends and I cooked up a plan at lunch to skip the rest of the day until I accidentally ruined it by asking, “What are we gonna do?” There was nothing within walking distance of the school and even if there were we had no money and had to be back by the time the buses came to pick us up, and none of us had a watch, and I’m pretty sure that even though our homeroom teacher barely paid attention to anything we did she would have noticed half a dozen kids missing that afternoon. So we went back to class.

I enjoyed that snow day. Most of my friends, I soon realized, had gone on to school, but even a bad day of exploring a winter wonderland was better than a good day at school—as if there were such a thing as a good day at school. The snow melted that afternoon and everything was back to normal the next day. I thought I might be in trouble for skipping school but so many kids, and even some teachers, had been out the day before they might as well have closed everything. I didn’t learn much in third grade but I did learn that sometimes you have to run from the bus.

The other day I was stopped on my way out of the grocery store by a tow truck parked in the middle of the road. Someone’s car had broken down in the middle lane which I thought was a terrible place to have a breakdown. For them, that is. It didn’t affect me, really—I could have backed up and gone out another way, and the tow truck driver was nearly done. With no one waiting behind me I was fine sitting and waiting. I also try to limit my trips out but I figured being in the car provided more than enough social distance and safety and, well, it’s precisely because I try to limit my trips out that I was actually happy for an excuse to sit and listen to the radio for a few minutes. There may be multiple vaccines for COVID-19 available now but there’s only one cure for cabin fever, but that’s another story.

Sitting there I also thought about some of my own experiences with tow truck drivers. We had a car die in the driveway once, which gave me more than a taste of cabin fever because not only could I not go anywhere but I had to sit and wait for a tow truck driver and when one did finally show up he couldn’t get the winch attached because our car had died as I was moving it so it was at a funny angle. He and I struggled to move it. His truck didn’t have a winch, which seemed odd for a tow truck, but I guess AAA was trying to save money by sending the cheapest guy they could get. The two of us weren’t able to get it up onto his truck so he left and I had to call AAA again and ask them to send another tow truck. The next day the same guy with the same truck showed up but he had some other guys with him. I helped them get the car up onto the truck even though I was tempted to let them do it by themselves after he made a wisecrack about how I wasn’t strong enough to move the car, because he was an asshole.

Then there was the time my wife and I were in Murfressboro, about an hour south of Nashville, and our van that we’d driven down there died. It had been having some trouble and driving it forty miles probably wasn’t the best idea, but we’d made a commitment and decided to take the chance. And the important thing is the van made it all the way to where we were going before it died. So I called AAA and while my wife stayed there—she later got a ride home with some friends—I rode with the tow truck driver. And he was a really nice guy who told me his name was Rick and he and his family moved to Tennessee from Miami and the work was better even if the climate wasn’t. The repair place where he dropped the van off wasn’t that far from our house. In fact it’s where we usually took our cars to get the oil changed, and a few times I’d left a car there and walked home because I’d rather be stuck at home without a car than stuck in a waiting room even if they do have free coffee and an interesting assortment of magazines from the eighties as well as The Shining playing on their big screen TV. Rick wouldn’t let me walk, though, and insisted on going the little extra distance to drop me off at home.

“Hey, thanks for letting me give you a ride,” he said. “Most of the time I’m out driving by myself so it was nice to have a partner for a change.”

I was a little stunned by that but I thanked him for giving me a ride and I hope he didn’t take it the wrong way when I also thanked him for not being an asshole.

Source: Goodreads

Nashville is starting a new project called Just Conversations and a community book reading of How to be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, which is a great book and making it a shared event with a panel discussion is a great idea. And circumstances still being what they are the event will be virtual which means it will be accessible to even more of the community than it would be if it were hosted at a specific location, which is great. I really appreciate that there are events like this designed to bring the city together, to create communication and just sharing. Still it just reminds me that less than a year ago I probably would have found out about an event like this because I’d see it advertised on the bus. There were only a few people whom I saw or even talked to regularly on the bus, and while I did get to know some drivers there was also a lot of turnover and I guess because of scheduling there seemed to be a lot of turnover the past few years, but I still felt like bus riders were a community, part of the larger community, but what we had in common was we were all headed in roughly the same direction.

Things are definitely getting better but it will still be a while before I go back to work, and when I do I won’t be riding the bus anymore, at least not as often as I used to. And the new normal we as a whole have to look forward to is going to be different from the way life was even a year ago.

This day also has me thinking about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and specifically what it means for communities. Nashville was an important center of the civil rights movement, and, like all cities, still has a role to play in the ongoing work. Unlike Montgomery, Alabama, which, just last month, marked the 65^th anniversary of the start of the bus boycott that ended segregation in its public transportation, Nashville didn’t have a major bus boycott. Still that event should remind all of us of the value of public transportation and how it doesn’t just get people from one place to another. I think that’s one reason some Nashville buses have memorial plaque to the memory of Rosa Parks that specifically say, “This seat is reserved for no one.” Although technically that’s not true. Those seats are for everyone, and they bring communities together.  

The other day my boss said, “When we go back to the office…” Obviously I’ve spent the last ten months thinking about that although the longer things have gone on the stranger it’s seemed. In spite of everything slowing down I feel like I never really stopped to consider things, like the fact that it was a March 16^th, 2020 that I used Zoom for the first time, and March 18^th, 2020 that I had my first case of Zoom fatigue. And, well, that’s pretty much all I can think of at the moment but it has been a year of big changes.

My wife decided she’ll be working from home even after things get back to normal—whatever normal looks like, and that means we won’t be riding to work together most days. It also means I won’t be riding the bus home most days. It’s the end of my adventures in busing, a change I always knew would come eventually but I never really thought about it because I never knew when it would come.  It also means I need to find a new parking space—we always used her parking permit and I had about a half mile walk to work. I’m still working out the details but my new parking place wherever it is will be closer to my building. I’ll have a much shorter walk, although I think I’ll still walk. The difference is it’ll be voluntary. I won’t need to walk to the bus.

All this made me realize that my daily routine never was routine. Every day was slightly different. We went to the same parking garage but rarely parked in the same place from one day to the next.        We never arrived at exactly the same time. I walked different paths every day. If it was raining or really cold I cut through a lot more buildings which slowed me down but I was fine with getting to work a little later if it meant I could be a little warmer or a little drier. On my way home no bus ever arrived exactly on schedule, and even when I rode with the same bus driver from one day to the next there were different people on the bus, different seats where I sat.

Every day was slightly different, but the differences were something I could count on, which is why I overlooked them. The differences have always been part of my routine.