From K through 5, my bus route to school was fairly uneventful. Oh, there was the usual rambunctiousness found among a bus-load of healthy elementary-school kids, packed with wild monkey energy. But there were never any harmful intentions toward anyone onboard. I always rode along, head against the window, watching the world roll peacefully by, feeling generally safe in my surroundings. 

On occasion, the chocolate milk we had for lunch would surge through our veins, turning us half-mad, and we had little choice but to act up. Otherwise, our little-kid bodies would burst. Sometimes the excitement we couldn’t contain en route to a field trip would get the best of us, and someone would mess up and spit out the window or wet his pants. (Not me, of course.)

But during these turbulent times, when the bus driver peered at us through that movie-screen-size rearview mirror of hers and yelled at us to straighten up or she’d march us right into the principal’s office, we’d snap to immediate attention. Deep down we longed to be subordinate. We felt bad when reprimanded. In fact, let it be known, we wanted our bus driver to like us.

Not so in middle school. The middle school building stood on the opposite side of town. Therefore, my bus route changed. Instead of the once happy neighborhoods, it now crept through those of kids who despised their bus driver. I’d expect better manners on prison buses. They’d yell obscenities at the bus driver and laugh at her empty threats. You mean she won’t really turn this bus around and take us back to school?  Even more appalling, they lived to destroy the lives of their classmates.

The worst thing about it was that several of the mean kids on my bus were legally old enough to join the Army. I was terrified of them, defenseless. I watched in stark horror at their antics as I tried to make myself invisible. I’d take a backseat, white-knuckling my Trapper Keeper, so no one could bully me from behind. Most the time this worked. The mean kids took little notice of me. They’d turn their wrath on each other or on a kid who stunk or looked funny. But sometimes the backseats were taken, and I’d find myself in the shark-infested middle of them. 

Over the years, I have mostly tried to black out my sixth-grade bus route. But once in a while, when watching a beautiful sunset or something, I’ll get whacked over the head with a sudden violent vision of the past.

There I am, in sixth grade, on the bus, with an acne cluster on my forehead, just trying to make it to school. Then snap! I hear the nauseous sound of a thick rubber band cutting the air. It came from behind. This is quickly followed by a burning sensation on my nape, which spreads like lightening to my toes. I can feel my pulse in the welt that is forming. On instinct, I turn to confront the source. When I meet the eyes of the 18-year-old hoodlum in the seat behind me, I immediately know I made a mistake. But it’s too late. I already turned around. 

“What are you looking at?” barks the kid. He looks crazy, like he’s itching to hurt me. ”You gotta problem?”

“Umm…” I say. “Well, umm, I thought you might have accidentally flipped me with a rubberband.”

“Nope.”

“OK. Sorry.”

Sometimes they wouldn’t even use rubber bands. Instead, they’d simply flatten their hands like paddles, lick the length of their flag-pole-length fingers, and smack the Dickens out of some poor, unsuspecting sap’s neck. I guess the wetness allowed for greater sting. I quickly learned to pop my shirt-collars to absorb some of the blow.

Then, one day, out of the blue, my bus route changed, just like that. I don’t know why. I didn’t even question it. I just figured God had heard my prayers. At first, suffering flashbacks, I’d scurry to the corner of my seat and tremble whenever anyone getting on or off the bus would accidentally brush against me. But in time, this all passed. I started wearing my shirt-collars down again. I even befriended some older kids–who were nice.

Nowadays, I sort of feel like I did when I was on the bad bus route. But substitute the bus route for the present-day bad economy. One day you’re just riding happily along, feeling safe, and then suddenly a major, century-old financial institution goes up in smoke. Car companies run out of gas. And, instead of your neck, it’s your 401K that’s getting smacked around. Or your job gets a wet-willy. (For those who don’t know, a wet willy is when someone jams a wet finger in your ear.)

Yes, throw in some Joe Biden gaffes, and you got some pretty scary times. But for the sake of Optimism, I reassure myself that things will one day bounce back. I have hope that my bus route will once again stretch through the peaceful neighborhoods of the bull market. In the meantime, however, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to wear my collar up.

Categories: Life, Travel
1 Comment »

Saturday evening, Jess accidentally knocked herself out on the pills her doctor had prescribed for some back pain she’d been having. That sneaky blinding pink “MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS” label on the pill bottle, slipped right past our noses (when’d that get there?) and without warning, Jess soon nodded off into a deep sleep that’d make Rip Van Winkle jealous. Our conversation leading up to the intoxicated moment went something like this: “You want to play a game?” “Sure…zzz…”

 If you don’t count the tv remote, it was good that Jess had refrained from operating heavy machinery. However, she did drive home on the stuff, and I half-wanted to check her car for dings, animal fur, or perhaps, an embedded lawn ornament.

Abandoned and left with nothing to do, I went right to work at mindlessly zoning out on random fixtures in the living room. When that grew tiring, I thought it might be good to check Jess’ pulse and wait for clear signs of breathing, just to be safe. I did the same with our dog, Phoebe, who lay beside her as though she, too, had gotten into Jess’ pills. The silent, sad walls of the house began to get to me, however, and though Jess and Pheobe snoozed away within arm’s length, they seemed a million miles away. Part of me couldn’t help but feel a little insulted that no one invited me to the 24 hour sleep-a-thon.

After an instance of self-pity, I adjusted to the realization that I should be happy because the night was mine to do whatever I pleased - as long as I did it very quietly, so not to wake the house. But the quiet was too much. For a split moment, I flashbacked to high school library. My chest tightened. I sensed that all too familiar pinned up adolescent rambunctousness. The urge to suddenly bust out laughing and wing paper wads at someone swept over me. Then the fear - I felt eyes on me. Mrs. Matthews was here, I knew it. Any second, she’d emerge from her hiding place, out of the deep dark shadows of the book shelves, and kick me out for another two weeks for being “too loud.”

At the risk of going completely insane with high school flashbacks and the maddening silence, I flipped on the tv. Jess was out for the night, anyway, no matter what ruckus I caused. Instinctively, I landed on the History Channel, which, to my delight, happened to be showing MonsterQuest, a documentary featuring daring scientists and cameramen tracking the jungles of developing countries, hot on the trail of the most notorious mythical creatures, such as the Lochness Monster, Big Foot, and Danny Devito. This noble expedition is done, of course, in the name of Science and, the less advertised, to get to the bottom of what the heck’s in the water that’s making the locals crazy.

But, if you ask me, I don’t think the locals are crazy at all. In fact, they are quite brilliant. What’s better to boost the economy of a poverty-stricken country than the monster tour biz? There’s always a market – man’s innate curiosity – and there’s practically no overhead, just a map and a perhaps a monkey in a mask.

And that may be precisely what we had on our hands here. This particular episode starred ”the real hobbit”, named after the loveable, tiny furry-footed creatures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novel triology. In short, the real hobbit is described as an orange-haired, three-to-four foot tall monkey-like creature with a human face (perhaps Gilbert Gottfried’s) whose favorite hide out is the thick jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia. According to eyewitnesses, it has the exact dimensions of the native orangutan – but that’s not what it is! Okay?!

Sometimes, I guess, this baby Chewbaca comes out and says hi to the villagers in his own special monkey-man sort of way by grabbing at roots and bolting up the overgrown side of the nearest dormant volcano when spotted. He’s not particularly violent or cheerful. In fact, the locals call him Orang Pendak, which means “we don’t know what he is or where he came from, but he’s very dull and could certainly use a shave.”

Before the expedition began, the scientists hired the local monster tourguide who had a booth set up right next to the “COCONUT DRINKS FOR 3 BANANAS OR TWO CHICKENS” stand guy. (By the looks of the place, I guessed barter system.) He didn’t speak a lick of English, but in his perfectly urban American translated voice, he went into wild detail about his confrontation with the real hobbit. Upon seeing him, the tourguide froze, he recalled. The real hobbit, probably startled by the monster tourguide bursting in on him in his jungle bathroom, did the only thing a real hobbit knows how: he grabbed at roots and made for the dead volcano.      

To my knowledge, no one’s actually ever held a conversation with the real hobbit. But the general consensus is that he is very intelligent. This was largely confirmed by the way the camera now and then panned in on the treetops, implying that the real hobbit could be cleverly hiding up there, watching (and eating popcorn) as his own search party stumbled through the jungle below calling out his name as if for a lost dog.

Turned out, after a half hour or so of watching these guys tromp around, stopping occasionally to comment on caches of animal dung, I realized the real hobbit was about as exciting as a hermit in need of a haircut. The Orang Pendak was rather a bore. I mean, he could have at least earned the reputation of raiding the village and terrorizing some chickens, or something. But he wouldn’t even give us this.  

To be honest, I didn’t stick around for the second half of MonsterQuest to find out if the scientists ever found him. Chances are they didn’t. Otherwise we’d have heard about it in the news by now, probably on E!, posing as Michael Jackson’s newest pet, or something. But if the scientists ever decide to go after it again, and they need something to slow the little guy down to make him an easier catch, I know where they can find some stuff that beats any tranquilizer out there on the market today.

“Right, Jess?”

“Zzz…” 

Categories: Mystery, Nature, Television, Travel
1 Comment »

Last summer my wife, Jess, and I hit Washington D.C. for a little week’s long vacation. Evidently, in junior high, I missed the boat on a school funded trip to our country’s capitol (something about grades, I guess). So now, nearly twenty years later, I decided to fund my own way, with my wife as my travel companion.

It helped that Jess has a cousin in D.C. who works for a congressman on Capitol Hill. She lives in a dizzying high-rise apartment building in the center of Ballston, Virgina (not to be confused with Boston, Massachusettes), a twenty minute Metro jaunt to the Capitol Building. She was nice enough to let us stay with her, and even sectioned off a makeshift bedroom for us in her studio apartment, which involved a curtain and a shower rod wedged between two walls. The light, breezy fabric of the curtain isolated us from the outside world, making it easy to imagine we were enjoying the comfortable quarters of an Arabian sheek.

Washington D.C. was fascinating. I got to see most the sights: the Capitol Builidng, the White House, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the place where Forrest Gump and Jenny splashed to each other’s warm embrace in the middle of the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument rising majestically in the background. Standing in the exact spot where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had made his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, I aborbed the beautiful landscape of democracy. As a history buff, it was all I had dreamed it would be. But, surprisingly, one sight put itself above all the rest: the D.C. Metro.

I hadn’t spent much time on a real-life subway. Having grown up in a small town, the extent of my experience of public transportation was pretty limited. For the most part, it amounted to nothing more than my buddy driving over to pick me up, or, regarding my earlier years, being packed into a rowdy school bus full of children who, to my endless adolescent torture, played out their impish roles as products of bad parenting. 

As we descended into the deep underground, leaping from one escalator to the next, I half expected to meet up with the earth’s core. Backtracking a few missed turns, we finally stumbled upon out platform, which began to tremble. Two beams of light raced toward us, flooding the dark tunnel encompassing them. Our train screeched to a holt and flung open the doors. A hard light with the same wattage as a bug light burned out my retinas before I noticed that inside was a certain mix of society you don’t see everyday. Besides a federal prison, it was the only place I could imagine where all classes of society are jammed into one place together. Homeless men sat next to big shot lawyers reading the Washington Post. Blue-haired elderly women shared seats with gothic teenagers, clutching their skateboards, packed away into their own little worlds, just them and the tunes pumping from their i-Pods.

I was just starting to get the hang of the Metro, even liking it a bit, when it came to a stop and picked up a rather intimidating man with a physique that could hurt someone, a moustache, a battered army jacket, and a head that was skinned to the quick. He did not sit down but stayed standing, holding on to the rail. “Good morning,” he announced, loud and clear, to two poor teenagers sitting nearby. His articulation was impeccable and fast, like the man on the old 80′s Micro Machines commercial, but with a deeper, richer tone.

His remarkable monologue first began with the Boston Red Sox - this I suppose because the one kid had on a Red Sox hat. He prattled on about a player for “The Sox” a long time ago who was appropriately nicknamed the human vaccuum cleaner, because of his ability to suck up sizzling ground balls from the field. From there, he continued to bounce from story to story, each showing zero relevance to the last, until finally he landed on the dangers of drug abuse. He blamed drugs for his inability to stick to one chain of thought for no longer than ten seconds at a time. I believed him. And Jess did, too, even though neither of us spoke a word about it until the man was off our train and at least two Metro stops behind us. Drugs had messed up his brain, and now he was a living poster child to all teenagers everywhere.

Then, just as quickly as drugs came up, he dropped the subject all together, and began again about ”The Sox”. Then it was drugs again. For his grand finale, he spoke of his faith in Jesus and how, why, just last night, for reasons unknown, he found a loaded gun stuck in his face.

When he finally reached his destination – thank the Lord - he got off, and everyone in our car sighed with relief and searched for someone or something sane to focus on for a bit.

Other than that, the Metro wasn’t such a bad way to get around. However, I did find it tough picturing Abraham Lincoln, back in the day, riding it to work.          

Categories: Travel
4 Comments »