Over the past several days I have been writing a short story. Most likely I will not share it here. Fiction, especially my skanky fiction doesn’t work in a blog format. However crafting the story jogged memories and memories are what make writing this thing fun.
The day was Sunday after New Year’s. Using www.onetwofiver.com I started out typing some thoughts about the snow blowing around outside my window. So often these little sights caught out of the corner of your eye take you mentally to places you haven’t been to in years. Watching these little paisley swirls of white it reminded me of bus trips I used to take between Farmington and East Lansing. Often these dusting swirls would be visible out the Americruiser’s windows as I made those weekend journeys to see my then girlfriend. Bundled up in my brother’s old 101st Airborne army coat I would hand the Greyhound driver my ticket and be off.
Most of the story was focused on the giggling bliss of new love and the way two people could see two entirely different realities despite using common words and expressing seeming agreement on about every topic under the sun. After I pounded out the 888 words that the writing exercise demands I kept thinking about the ride itself. Surely people of a certain age (that is 45 and over) remember similar bus rides. My struggle was trying to describe the experience of almost two hours spent pressed against the cold glass window trying to avoid contact with the various damaged goods that were travelling with me on that common carrier.
What you wanted to do on the local run from East Lansing to Farmington was to take yourself to a state close enough to sleep that you could hear when they called out your stop out but deep enough to be removed from clear reality. Oversleeping would end you up in Southfield or downtown Detroit going east. Overshooting the right stop was problematic. Southfield was barren and Detroit was funky. However if you stayed awake you had to talk to the poor crazies who were on the bus there because their family didn’t want to ride in the same car with them and thus they were shipping them off to Aunt Mae’s on the hound.
If you are thinking I am being too harsh on this point I offer the following. One time I had a guy talk to me about his invisible 6 foot tall stuffed dog for the whole hour and 45 minutes of the ride. Said invisible dog was plush and colored brown and while like a beagle. It was sitting in the empty seat across the aisle from us. Geesh. No, it was not named Harvey.
You really wanted to go far enough down into sleep that you did not have to talk to or smell the other passengers. There was a certain odor on those buses that remains in my mind unto this day. If you sat too far back you got a whiff of the blue sanitized water of the lavatory every time the bus lurched from lane to lane.
Most of time Michigan’s skies remain gray. Without direct sun it was easy to wad that old army coat up against the window and drift off. It you trained yourself well, and you could train yourself if you did this trip on a routine basis as I did, the vibrations and shaking the bus would make downshifting for an exit would wake you enough to assess where you were and how much time was left before your stop. If your stop was just a few minutes away you might even go to the back three rows of the bus to have a cigarette and wake up. Man that was ages ago wasn’t it. If it was a little warmer you could get the group W bench guys in the back to crack the window a little and share the sacred herbs. My girlfriend’s parents were a little intense and taking the edge off helped.
The trip was an exercise in Zen awareness. I am sure that as I tweak this part of the story more details will come back. Like one of my favorite site’s on the run was a drug store it Williamston or Fowlerville. It was called Fate’s Pharmacy. How cool and absolutely spooky story perfect is that?
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