If I Were A Bus Driver

If I were a bus driver, I would be the totally cool kind. You know I wouldn’t make people feel bad when they forgot their bus passes, and I would confine my remarks to “Good Morning” and “You have a nice day now,” unlike some people I could mention. I would make sure that blind folks got their dogs all situated before I started the bus back up, instead of lurching the bus really violently so that the poor dog slips and falls and then slinks under the seat and looks sheepish. In fact, I would never lurch at all, so as to prevent nausea on the part of my book-reading passengers. I certainly wouldn’t do that stop-and-start thing over and over again, just in case anyone on the bus had maybe a delicate inner ear or a queasy stomach. And of course, I would make sure to fix people who sighed and rolled their eyes whenever a person in a wheelchair got on board with a steely glare.

Possibly I would be the kind of bus driver that dresses up a little on Halloween…just a little, like cat ears or something, nothing crazy. And I definitely would be the kind that calls out the stops when the bus windows are all fogged up because the bus is crowded and it’s cold outside, just in case there was a girl who was taking an unfamiliar bus to meet her boyfriend near his office and she hadn’t managed to get a window seat so she could rub a little circle on the fogged up window so she could see out and make sure she didn’t miss her stop.

But all this is just normal ordinary good busdrivership, which I hope I would take seriously and uphold to the best of my ability…you know, unlike everything I do now. Perhaps the mantle of busdrivership would inspire me to new heights of ambition and accountability. No way to know. Anyway, the real thing I would do if I were a bus driver would be sort of a secret. I wouldn’t be able to do it very often, due to its very nature. You see, every once and again, I would use the bus to take people where they really wanted to go.

I would wait until I had a busload of people who looked sort of sad that day and who stared at the floor during their commute. I’d drop off the rest of the people, and then when it was just those people who looked like they really needed a little boost from their bus driver, I would close all the doors with that special door closer handle, and say into the microphone “Okay, folks. I’m not taking you to your soul-sucking, worthless day jobs today. I’m not condemning you to eight or so hours in a windowless box so that you can deal with corporate accounts receivable or human resources or team building activities or any of that. Today….we’re going for a little ride.” I would have to pick just the right moment for this, as you might imagine, because otherwise it could turn into some sort of hostage situation or something and I wouldn’t want to freak anyone out. I’d have to wait until I got some people whose faces just lit up at the idea of not having to go to work that day, too many sick days this month be damned, and I’d have to make sure it was one of those days where these people were staring out the window wondering what they were doing and why they didn’t just get off at the next stop and do something, anything, else, than sit on the bus.

So I would drop one guy with dark circles under his eyes back at his girlfriend’s house just in time for him to sneak in and get back under the covers while she was getting into the shower so he could surprise her and then they could go out for a nice breakfast and spend the day doing something fun. I’d drop one woman off at the good used bookstore and another guy at the arty movie theater. I’d let the new mom off right at her horrible day care center so she could go in and get her baby with no delay. Probably several people would want to go to parks or maybe the beach, and I gather one or two would just want to go get coffee and maybe do the errands they didn’t get around to doing over the weekend. Someone might want to go to the gym, even, or for a walk around Green Lake or to Pottery Barn or whatever. I wouldn’t ask questions. I would just pull over and put on the flashers and let down the wheelchair thing if they were in a wheelchair and wave goodbye and say “Now you have a good day,” and watch them stagger off, still sort of shocked. That would be that. That’s the kind of bus driver I would be.