anniversaries

i am approaching a momentous occasion, the six month anniversary of my tenure as a bus driver... fully half the time that i told myself that i would knock out doing this rarified occupation. when i began last june, i told myself that as long as i swam instead of sinking, that i would tough it out for a year and have it under my belt, "year spent driving a bus..." will go into my autobiography one day. i'm wondering if i should go buy myself a quart of motor oil or a sparkplug or something like that in another six months. is it oil or steel or maybe aluminum for the one year anniversary?
but like many a college student that i am driving back and forth to and from school, i am putting on the freshman fifteen. i am donning the appearance of a bus driver, potbellied, abrasive, fun loving, talkative. everything that is stereotyped by ralph kramden is true of most drivers. i haven't weighed myself lately, but i do think that i have put on a good fifteen pounds, maybe even more like twenty. its a job of without alot of activity except for turning a powers teering assisted wheel. the most physical work that you do is loading the occasional suitcase beneath the bus and its not like we warm up for that. if buses were powered like a fred flintstone car, we would get exercise, but when the majority of the activity that we can get is walking around the bus and moving a mirror, the result is weight gain.
melissa and i had our thanksgiving last night on my day off. thanksgiving dawned bright and cloudy last thursday. i rode to new york on another bus and found out that lo and behold, the overnight run to oneonta was open and i was tapped to be the driver. the night when everyone was stumbling around watching football and napping on the couch was the night that i found myself sleeping on a bed at the holiday inn watching old movie reruns with a 4am wake up call set at the front desk. the greyhound snack bar at the port authority had a drivers special which they do every year for those drivers stuck away from home... a turkey dinner which i was too tired and depressed to partake of. it was the farthest thing from what the pilgrims had envisioned and i wanted nothing to remind me of the fact that i was 102 miles from home by the bus odometer, cleaning up the bus in a snowy parking lot when the majority of americans are just about ready for their third slice of pumpkin pie.
my smoking is concerning me too. on my days off, i am lucky to smoke one or two cigarettes. with the prospect of standing around wondering how far i will drive today and when my ass will start aching from sitting in a bus seat for five and a half hours in a row, i smoke like a chimney. its a rare driver who looks like he has beeen there longer than a few months who doesn't light up a smoke as soon as he or she gets to the dispatchers stand at the port.
i think that for my health at the very least, i should give this up on my first year anniversary. my dad would be inclined to agree. he worked for general electric for nearly 28 years all the while pining away for the career that he had wanted, to teach english. i watched him during the late 1980's go back to school and get his masters from the college of saint rose in albany. while others at ge were working overtime, he gave up half a shift once or twice a week, got less sleep and spent afternoons writing papers on the porch in front of his big black manual typewriter. he loved it and while i completed high school, my father was getting his masters. he had always planned upon going back to teaching despite the years after he had retired and starting anew at something that he had always wanted to try his hand at. my father warned me on more than one occasion that you should never get too tied down to one career, unless it was absolutely what you loved and wanted out of life... and he would always add, how did you know what you wanted until you tried it? i have tried driving a bus as a career and found that i liked it, but it didn't ring any big bells for me, just the occasional air horn trumpeting, but that wasn't a sign from heaven. my dad would be proud of me for trying this and will be even prouder when i give it up and move onto the next big career while i, like he, find out what i want to be when i grow up. in this month when i have just, thankfully passed through subconsciously and consciously unaware of the one year anniversary of my fathers death, i have this to thank him for. we've both moved onto different things and experiences, both where we never knew that we would see and did not know how we would grapple and deal with them. as my dad sits in the happy hunting grounds, valhalla, heaven drinking with william shakespeare, hemingway and faulkner, i thank him for this and hope that he too is getting an answer to at least some of his questions about the unknown.