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While things are gradually returning to normal, or at least a new normal, there’s still no clear word on when I’ll return to my old office. The place where I work is still under semi-lockdown which makes sense: it’s near a hospital and the higher-ups prefer to err on the side of caution.  The other day my wife, who’s arranged to work from home permanently, and I were discussing what we’d do when I do finally go back.

“Maybe we can just skip paying for a parking pass,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind driving you to the bus stop. And then on days when I’m not working you can get a day pass.”

That she offered to drive me to the bus stop surprised me at first but then I started thinking about it. We both get up at the same time every morning because of the canine alarm so it’s not as though she’d get any extra sleep if I drove to work, and, as short as it may be, the drive to the bus stop would be a chance to spend a little more time together before starting the work day.

And I thought about all the benefits of riding the bus. I get to sit back and relax, I don’t have to worry about finding a parking spot, I get some exercise walking to and from the bus stop. In a small way me riding the bus benefits other people too.

Back in the pre-pandemic times whenever I’d drive to work I’d pass by people standing at bus stops. Some of them I even recognized. I’d frequently see a guy I knew from the bus. We never talked but I remembered him because he’d sometimes ask the driver to pull up about fifty feet so he could get off at the entrance to his apartment building. Why there was a stop fifty feet from the entrance to an apartment building and not, you know, right in front of it, is a mystery to me, but the bus drivers were always willing to go the extra distance.

When I’d see him, or others, I’d always think about pulling over and offering to give them a ride. There are a lot of reasons I never did. For one thing if there was heavy traffic there was no way I could safely pull over—I’m not driving a bus—and anyway by the time I recognized anyone or even saw someone at a bus stop I was already going by. For another thing I don’t know if anyone waiting for a bus would accept a ride from a complete stranger. I’ve had strangers offer to give me a ride. The only time I ever took one up on it was when I was chasing a bus I’d just missed and a guy pulled over and offered to drive me to the next stop so I could catch it. I’ve forgotten his name now but I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

To get back to my point, though, the reason public transportation exists is because people use it. Nashville’s public transportation isn’t great but as long as people use it we can hopefully prevent it from getting any worse. Maybe we can, collectively, make it better—although that would be more likely if more people rode the bus. I’m just one rider so, as I said, my contribution will be small, but at least I’ll be contributing to the continuing bus service, and that will benefit other people.

This doesn’t have anything to do with Memorial Day so here’s something that does.

So a guy hijacked a school bus full of kindergarteners and that could be the beginning of a really dark story but instead it turned out to be the beginning of a hilarious story. The kids kept asking the hijacker questions, and although the news reports don’t say so I’m pretty sure at least one of them asked, “Why aren’t you taking your own car?” and he got so annoyed he finally got off the bus, although I’m sure it was, “Why is the sky blue?” that pushed him over the edge. No adult, even those of us who know why the sky is blue, has ever been able to answer that question to a child’s satisfaction, but that’s another story. The bus driver hails the kids as the real heroes and while I think he’s not giving himself enough credit—he stayed calm which certainly helped—he’s also right. The kids really saved the day here just by being typical kids who are curious about the world and I hope they never lose that curiosity.

That’s really all that can be said about that story but it did get me thinking about how many people are annoyed when they’re on a plane and some other passenger has a crying baby. Maybe it would get to me more if I flew more regularly but when I’ve been on a plane and there’s a crying baby I just feel bad for the parent or guardian who’s doing everything they can to calm the kid down and who will inevitably have to listen to a lot more crying even after they’ve left the plane, and I feel bad for the baby. That moment on every flight when my ears pop is bad enough for me, and I know it’s coming. If I were less than a year old and had my ears suddenly feel like they were stuffed full of cotton and then clear I’d be crying too.

It also made me think about the summer I worked as a camp counselor. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a hijacker but someone who voluntarily worked with children but the kids’ questions never annoyed me, not even, “When’s lunch?” because usually the time they started asking that my own blood sugar was getting low and while that generally makes me testy I understood how they felt. And we had enough activities, from water slides to modeling clay, that I could distract them if they asked any questions I couldn’t answer.

Possibly the only time the questions got awkward was one morning before the camp activities started. I often got there before the kids and would bring a book to pass the time, and one young girl pointed at my copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and asked, “What’s that about?” I would have felt guilty lying about it so I carefully explained that it was about a young woman who wants to be a writer and attempts suicide, and that it was somewhat autobiographical and that the woman who wrote it eventually dd commit suicide. I braced myself for a lot of uncomfortable questions, but the young girl just said, “That sounds interesting. I may read that someday.”

To avoid any further awkward moments I left The Bell Jar at home after that and just brought a small volume of tales by Edgar Allan Poe.

Source: Google Maps

When friend and fellow blogger Ann Koplow was here in Nashville one of the things she noticed about downtown was the lack of houses with windows. It was an interesting observation, and while I’d never thought about the lack of windows one thing that’s always bothered me about Nashville is that it’s a city that for a long time kept business and residential areas widely separated. At the heart of downtown there are a lot of things to see and do but not a lot of places to live. This even created problems for tourists sometimes. For several years I went to the Southern Festival of Books, always held downtown on a weekend in late September, and while there was a lot going on at the festival it could be hard to get a good lunch because most of the restaurants and other businesses in the area simply shut down for the weekend. Their regular customers were the business people who were only around on weekdays.

Just a few blocks from the Festival was the Nashville Arcade, and while it’s now a bustling part of the Arts District, for several years it was deserted, even on a Friday afternoon.

Source: Old Town Trolley Tours

In the mid ‘80’s and early ‘90’s there was an attempt to revitalize downtown with a summer weekend festival called Summer Lights that combined booths for businesses and free concerts, but all it ever really did was highlight how much of downtown was empty. Once the festival was over everybody left and there was no reason to come back.

As you head outward there are more houses, although there are some weird exceptions too. A stretch of 17^th Avenue South, for instance, pictured above, looks like it’s a street of nice little houses, but look closely at the yard signs and you’ll see they’re all recording studios. Homes have been turned into businesses.

That’s slowly changing, especially downtown where some former businesses are being turned into homes—or at least apartments, but it was interesting to hear an outsider’s perspective, to see the city through the window of Ann’s eyes.