Some days the bus is a barrel of laughs. Sometimes it’s chuckling with the guy who sits in the front seat and knits (he says he was a former school bus driver who found he had some down time sitting in his bus and taught himself to knit. Some of the boys that he hauled to and from school, however, poked fun at it, giving him a bottle of nail polish for a Christmas gift. Har-har. Well, guess who has all the warm scarves?) 

Other times it’s Chris pretending he’s stealing the lunches of the women on their way to housekeeping duties at a hotel off of I-270. They always laugh and hold their bags closer, taking their seats and no doubt talking about him in Spanish. 

But then there are those days when my bus buddies break my heart. 

The other night a woman and her two little boys got on near the mall. It wasn’t that late, but it was already dark and rather cold and damp from days of rain. The boys took their seats, stone-faced. I smiled at them, but they didn’t smile back. Their mother said hello, but she, too, remained stoic. She had the bald head of a cancer patient and I wondered their story and prayed they had someone looking after them.  

Daylight Savings Time ended more than a week ago, but it’s still not   

quite sinking in, especially in the mornings when it’s getting light   

and I’m used to it being way dark when I arrive at the bus stop. Even   

though I’ve just checked my watch, the fact that I can make out the   

shapes of cars and trash cans has me breaking into a run, thinking   

it’s later than it is, so I don’t miss the bus. 

My internal clock is so out of whack that I wake up at my normal time   

which means extra minutes to cook oatmeal for breakfast, but thus   

robs me of an excuse to stop off at the Roy Rogers for an egg and   

cheese biscuit and those fabulous home fries. 

What also helps is having a bus driver who plays my conscience,   

repeatedly asking if I really want to jump off early at the Roy’s   

stop. The way I figure, the extra long walk takes care of any grease   

intake from those potatoes. 

But with more light in the morning, there’s less at night. One of my   

office mates asked if I was toting mace as I headed to the stop in   

the gathering dusk. 

The drivers also have to be extra observant, especially at stops that   

don’t normally have a lot of passengers and people are dressed in   

dark clothes. More than once we overshot the stop and the rider had   

to come running, breathlessly plugging coins into the farebox. 

We’re all waiting until we start seeing the light again.