A recent news story highlighted complaints about Indianapolis’ Union Station and the condition of the bus terminal. I am a frequent consumer of interstate bus transportation, a mode of transportation that I utilized when I was in high school, travelling from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania to Philadelphia to see my girlfriend. I met her after my mother put me and my brother on the bus to spend the summer with my aunt in Philadelphia. We left from Pittsburgh’s Union Station (commonly called Penn Station). I don’t remember the conditions of the station then, though my family had occasionally embarked from there on trains to Baltimore Maryland. But a couple of years ago, I got to see Penn Station again.
Early in March of 2020, I was on a bus from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh; news of the Coronavirus pandemic had Indiana entering what would prove to be a long period of cautionary behavior. My brother needed help, which is why I boarded the bus. The ridership was light on the trip toward Pittsburgh, and most people seemed to be trying to maintain physical distancing. An old friend who has been looking in on my brother picked me up at Penn Station. The bus terminal was as seedy as the one in Indianapolis, but I don’t have high expectations of bus stations.
Sometime in early 2000, my duodenum burst, the result of my untended ulcer. When my mother learned of my hospitalization, she boarded a bus in Pittsburgh and rode to the rescue of her forty-something son in St. Louis Missouri. I was so sick that it did not occur to me to fret about my 75-year-old mother travelling alone on a bus. My friends, who had shepherded me to the hospital and then home, picked up my mother from the bus station. My mother and I did not discuss the conditions of the various bus stations that one encounters on the stops between Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
I am not one to engage with others when I am on the bus but on one long, pre-COVID-19 trip to New Jersey, a man noted the book I was reading and started a conversation with me. I don’t remember the details of the conversation, but he gave me his name and told me that his cousin had written a best-selling novel about the Vietnam war that had been made into a movie. At the time, I knew the cousin’s name and the name of the book and movie, but those three things are now lost from my memory. But one of my most miserable moments occurred on a bus ride from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.
The woman in the seat in front of me had boarded the bus in Ohio. She was in an aisle-side seat, as I was, though I usually chose a window if it was available. My travelling companion (sorry, Paul Simon) was a book, but the woman in the seat in front of me distracted me. She was sighing and murmuring and softly calling to her savior to help her; I was irritated by her constant commentary and not selfless enough to make any effort to assist her. When the bus reached St. Louis, the passengers disembarked; the lady in the seat in front of me did not. I watched as bus company personnel climbed onto the bus and approached the slumped figure. I was still at the station when the police and ambulance arrived to care for the woman who had sighed and died while I sat uncaring, behind her.
I do not remember the condition of the station.
cjon3acd@att.net