I ended the phone conversation with an employee who could do nothing to correct my circumstance and turned to my eldest daughter, saying, “I have to go get her.” Lisa took me to the train station in Morristown, New Jersey, where I boarded a New Jersey Transit train to New York City’s Penn Station. An hour later I took the Number 3 subway uptown to the Port Authority. I was going to get Esmerelda. Later, my daughter told me how she knew that I was worried about Esmerelda: I had put an empty pan back onto a hot burner on the stove. Years ago, Lisa told me that she thought of me when she saw the movie, “Taken.” It was her way of saying that she knew that if she were to be kidnapped, I’d bring her home. And in June of this year, after I got Esmerelda back, I sent my daughter a message: “I got her!”
I had taken the world’s longest bus ride to go see my daughter and my grandchildren in New Jersey. Esmerelda rode with me from Indianapolis, along with a man who was also going to Newark. At stops in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey over the 20 hours of travel, the man would shoulder his way from the back of the bus, snarling, “Move it people, c’mon!” He was angry and eager to get to a smoking area, and each person in front of him was to yield to his need. He pushed aside women and children but pulled up short behind men, muttering, “Geez! Let’s go!” He irritated me, and I was stupid enough to return the favor. When the bus arrived in Newark, I purposely planted myself in front of the man, and slowly dragged my carry-on luggage off the bus. He muttered behind me, and I moved more slowly each time I heard him. What I did was mean-spirited and petty, and my behavior came with a cost.
When I realized that Esmerelda was missing, I made 21 frantic phone calls before I decided to take matters into my own hands. After completing my mission — which would have seemed impossible only to those who do not know me — I took a subway back downtown to Penn Station and a NJ Transit train to Morristown. As the train clacked down the tracks, I reflected on my boorish behavior.
The irritating man (this is not a subjective opinion: he was irritating) was bullying the bus, but no one was being physically harmed by his behavior. It seemed that some were inconvenienced, but not in a significant way. I’m sure that I was not the only person who found his behavior repulsive, but I was one of the few who had no need to be in the aisle when the man was bulldozing his way to another puff. Yet, I was the one who chose to purposely inconvenience the man when we arrived in Newark, a choice that caused me to forget my traveling companion.
When Lisa picked me up that night at the Morristown train station, I imagine that she giggled a little, but perhaps she also remembered the time she ran away from college and I found her, and when she skipped telling me that she was not coming home, and I found her. Liam Neeson and I both have a “special set of skills.”
Lisa knows that I will come to get her; she saw me make heroic efforts to retrieve my companion, Esmerelda, my beloved pool cue that I left in the overhead bin of the Greyhound bus.