Riding The Bus

The Amish ride Greyhound. So do dogs. And so does the lady traveling to be reunited with her son. The Amish couple chose to ride close to the front of the bus. For breakfast, they ate bologna and cheese white bread sandwiches and cheetos that came in plastic bags marked Salvation Army. Amish man wiped a lot of bright orange cheese powder on his dark blue pants. I wondered how Amish wife, in her Amish dark blue and black dress, felt about cleaning up after him. Her life seemed much harder. Every time Amish man left the bus, he donned a straw hat. On the bus, Amish wife covered her hair with a white scarf topped with a black scarf. Every time she left the bus, she slapped on a stiff black bonnet with sides as prominent as horse blinders. I'm pretty sure she wasn't having as much fun as the dogs in the back of the bus. The dogs boarded last in St. Louis. They strolled down the aisle on leashes held by two young twenty-somethings tattooed and pierced. Each time the bus stopped, the dogs, their owners and a cloud of other back-of-the-bus-ers poured off for cigarette breaks. I parted ways with the dog set in Nashville and asked Tattoo Girl how she'd gotten the dogs on the bus. Greyhound has a no-pets policy and she, her honey and the dogs had been riding the bus for four days. Our dogs are service dogs, she said. The Amish also split off in Nashville. I wondered if Amish wife ever wished, just once, to wear a pair of high heels or even sandals. As they departed, Excited Lady got on the bus and sat across from me. "I'm riding to meet my son," she said. "I haven't seen him since he was two." "How old is he now?" I asked. She said, "He's thirty." She told me bits and pieces of how she lost contact and then reconnected on Facebook. Only parts of her story made sense. Other parts, I figured I didn't need to know. "How long do you plan to visit," I asked. Her reply, "I bought a one-way ticket." As we pulled into the station in Murfreesboro, TN, her son got out of his car. I could see a family resemblance. They hugged. He looked glad to see her. I wondered if he knew she plans for her visit to last forever. She'll need that much time, I thought, to explain how she ever let her toddler go and why it took so long to find him.