There I was on the greyhound bus. There were two guys in the back talking pretty loudly. It seemed like they were having a good time. From my seat in the middle of the bus I listened to them, and I would turn around and look back at them from time to time because what they were doing seemed fun and what I was doing was boring. I was curious about the guys in the back. There are some people you will never talk to unless you do it on a greyhound bus.
The guys made a gesture towards me to come back and sit with them. I gathered up my bag and went back there. There were two of them, a chubby and talkative guy who said he was from Portland and a skinny quiet guy from Jamaica who wore sunglasses in the dark. The chubby guy told me they were riding to Idaho and that I should definitely come with them. They were picking up a big car and driving it back to Seattle. There were some other parts of their plan about which he wasn’t being very clear, which I now can’t remember at all. He seemed deliberately unclear. The guy from Jamaica said, “we lived in the mountains and we nev-ah came down! We wah nev-ah slaves! We ran away from them and they could nev-ah capture us!” I told them that I definitely was not going with them to Idaho. I did stay in the back of the bus with them, though, and we rode together all the way to Seattle. I remember being a little surprised that these guys were interested in talking to me.
Is this a true story? Yes. The only way that this story could possible be true is if I were 20 years old when it happened. Which I was. I keep bumping into surprising memories of things that have happened to me and it’s hard to imagine that it actually was me doing those things. This morning I was remembering moving all of my belongings from one house to another in a shopping cart. The houses were more than a mile apart. After I had taken two trips in one day (4 miles) an older friend took pity on me and drove my third and final load in her old Studebaker. I don’t recall feeling stupid about transporting all my personal belongings clothing across town in a shopping cart, which seems kind of funny to me. I remember being proud of myself because I was utilizing my own resources to take care of myself, aside from the shopping cart, which I borrowed from a grocery store, from which I later got caught shoplifting a pocket full of macadamia nuts.
