Waiting for the Bus

The other day, a CBC Radio host--the one who tells us his name every fifteen seconds--spoke  of the rich pleasures of public transit, with its resultant immersion in cultural diversity.  He cited, as example, that well-known ode to group travel,  "Marrakech Express."

Your correspondent decided to heed this advice and began journeying by bus; and found, to his surprise, two contrasting phenomena:  increased politeness and increased thuggery.  Bus drivers now smile and greet passengers; passengers on disembarking call out "Thank you!"  But at the other end of the day, there have been attacks on drivers, which leads one to wonder if soon night-drivers will guard themselves in the manner of long-distance truckers, with a baseball bat in the cab and a shotgun in a rack over the dash.

Part of the cultural diversity in which I have immersed myself is the curiosity of fellow passengers talking to themselves.  Not disturbing, generally, but one was somewhat unnerved to hear a driver talking to himself.  (Well, I suppose, whatever is needed to get through the day with every little thing intact, as Gary Fjellgard memorably once sang). 

I thought briefly of John Steinbeck's novel "The Wayward Bus," in which the driver decides he will veer from the usual route and take his busload of passengers to Mexico.  This later was made into a film, with Dan Dailey behind the wheel. 

That gave a whole new meaning to "busman's holiday."  This term originated in the days of horse-drawn vehicles, when a driver, on his day off, would go for a ride with one of his pals. The oddest modern instance of a busman's holiday took place in Toronto during the year-long run of "2001:  A Space Odyssey."  A projectionist, after watching the film three times a day, six days a week, would return to the theatre on his day off, buy some popcorn, and watch it again.  When the film finally ended its run, the projectionist was bereft:  "I don't what I'll do with my life," he is reported to have said.

This, I think, is significantly weirder even than these famous lines from Annie Ross's lyrics to Wardell Gray's "Twisted":

"Oh they used to laugh at me 

 When I'd refuse to ride 

 On all those double-decker buses

 All because there was no driver on top."