Thing-a-day.com

I take the bus to work, and it’s generally one of the more enjoyable parts of my day. The morning ride in is when I mentally plan my day, and the evening trip home is when I decompress and plan the evening. I often also get a good story out of it, and tonight was no exception.

I usually ride the same buses, and have gotten to know many of the drivers to a certain extent – at least well enough to know their driving habits, predict how likely they are to be on time, etc. For example, there is the woman who drives the 8:30am local. She is an older woman with salt and pepper spiky hair and these fantastic red-rimmed glasses. She is the only driver I know who can say “good morning” when I get on and “have a great day!” as I get off, and sound like she means it.  Then, there is the man who drives the 4:47pm bus home – he used to be my morning driver, and you could set your watch to him! Even though he can be a bit gruff, I appreciate that he fights like hell to keep on schedule, so he ranks quite highly on my list of drivers.  Lastly, I cannot forget the singing driver – he places a large “SMILE” sign in the front window of the bus, and one day regaled us as we were leaving downtown with a original ditty to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb – he even used the air brakes on the bus as punctuation in the song!

Tonight was someone new. I was riding home later than usual, and as we head out of downtown our driver announces in a voice that is better suited to a late-night jazz station than a bus, “and now we are turning east, leaving beautiful downtown Seattle behind us.” Accustomed to driver announcements more along the lines of, “Pike Place Market, Westlake Center, monorail”, we found this amusing. Later, as we left Fremont (“Center of the Universe” – really, we have a sign to prove it) and turned up in to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, we heard, “Turning in to the Independent Republic of Ballard.”  Living in Ballard, I got of the bus minutes later and was finally able to see the person that went with the disembodied voice. He was an extremely pleasant 40-something Italian man, probably just looking for a way to make his evening route more enjoyable.

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