Bus trip efg's

To sum up, Papa’s shed, when it was finished, was three-quarters of a large, malodorous wooden box without heat, without paint, without charm, and without ostensible purpose. Which is why I felt forced, the first time I stood in it alone after dark, to conclude that what I’d taken to be Papa’s new lease on life might in fact have been a quiet but complete loss of sanity. The odd thing was, this notion didn’t much bother me. Having spent half my time studying the things that schoolteachers, church preachers and paper mill and aluminum plant owners considered “sane,” I figured Papa’s sanity couldn’t do us any more harm than everyone else’s sanity was already doing. ~ David James Duncan ~ The Brother’s K ~ p.106.


I load the bus, like many others like many times before. One of my accompanees is a young boy that appears to me about five wearing a blank shirt and uniformed looking khaki pants. School's been back in session for some weeks now, so it may be a new and exciting kindergarten that this boy’s garb is representing. He is determined to make the most out of this after-school bus-trip in a school bus, full of adults going to the market to work, not learn; who have mostly just graduated from sixth grade, and cannot do the reading or writing that he will soon have the opportunity to learn. So, in order to fulfill this purpose, shoulders hunched, lips wavering, eyebrows raised, he asks and is granted the honored cockpit seat right next to the bus driver and his whole control panel. In one full ask, this boy has now been given the best window seat in the bus; a three foot full frontal view of motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, women carrying baskets of maize on their heads, and dogs, the constant but momentary obstacles dodging and sometimes creating all this that they have come to know as traffic. It all passes by for the boy like the video game he once played, where crashing into fire hydrants and running into police barricades were his usual game ending events. But, this was even cooler, because it was real life and this idealized bus driver was weaving in and out of similar road teasers; managing this long vehicle full of passengers with ease. When the bus driver was not looking, which was most of the time, this boy would pretend the large steering wheel was in fact in front of him, and he had left his life of smashing into fire hydrants and walked into that of stopping, turning and speeding up at just the right moment to get to the market as fast as he can while picking up every passenger he possibly can.

The bus driver closes the open window, his one safety precaution for his new sidekick. He then presses his finger gingerly on the boy’s stomach, possibly telling one or two more safety tips, explaining a little shop, or hearkening good behavior. My best guess is the latter. From then on, the bus driver returned to bus driver world. This particular bus driver’s head is about one inch higher and sometimes ventures below this very steering wheel the boy imagined he was using. His eyes seem much farther down, indicating either a lack of thought altogether, or an over consumed state of fantasized thought; a switch he seemed to turn off and on during unamused uneventful periods of driving. The very images that sent surges through this little boy’s excitement center seemed altogether expected and regular for this bus driver. Even the occasional close call had already been rerun. Every now and then, this bus driver would participate in these unnecessary forms of communication with the cobradors, descriptions about the height and weight and other keep-out body parts of subsequent women on the bus, passing by, and of those they’d something’d in lower forms of language would often subdue.

The boy didn’t understand such language yet,though it slowly would seep into his conscience and word by word change the way he viewed women. Luckily, at this point, it didn’t yet matter, he too was in his own bus driver world. Where a high school drop-out drinking on or before and after the weekends was a hero, the dogs and taxi drivers were villains and this five year old had just the right idea to make it all work out.

At least he got one of the three right, we’ll hope he hasn’t unlearned it by the time he’s old enough to impact it.