Chapter 30: Chapter
the Last
Job #85: Bus Driver
2010 to 2019
It has taken me awhile to get around to writing this, what
should be the final chapter in this on-going saga I call life. Part of the
delay was simply time constraints. There has been a lot going on around the
homestead the last few weeks. The real problem, though, is it just felt weird
to try and write a final chapter for a life that is still going on. I’ll admit
to a bit of superstitious thinking that writing the last chapter about my life might have the same effect
upon my life.
I’ve read a few biographies and autobiographies or memoirs
in my time. From my perspective, the biographers have the easier time of it: “So-and-so
was born at such-and-such a time, did some stuff, then died, the end”. I can’t remember how the autobiographers and
memoirists ended their tales – probably at some point in their recent past or then-present.
What if something amazing happened to them after they published their life’s
story? It reminds me of how Trivial Pursuit put out their first 1980’s Edition
just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, thus missing one of the biggest events
of the decade. Why didn’t they wait until 1990? I guess I’m going to have to go
back and re-read some of those autobiographies for some hints as how to wrap
this up. But let’s plunge ahead, shall we? After all, this whole blog is really
just a rough draft for the book I plan to write.
I’ve already written about some of the differences in bus
driving between the mid ‘80s and today in Chapter 16, so there is no need to
rehash those. I’ve certainly had some
crazy experiences in the past five years. I could go on at some length about
the many weird people I’ve encountered on the bus, but I think I’ll save those
stories for my moribund other blog, The Idiots Aboard. The point of this
chapter – and indeed, the whole project – isn’t really about the jobs
themselves. It’s supposed to be about why
I’ve had so very many jobs over a lifetime.
Before we get into that rotten stuff, however, let me catch
you up on some of the significant events which have occurred since I’ve been
working at job #85. When I first started, I saw it as an easy stop-gap position
while I continued to look for that elusive GIS job I so coveted. Unfortunately,
I was working long hours and split shifts, so time for job-searching was
limited. Also, the nature of the job itself was quite draining. Remember what I
said in Chapter 16 about people seeming to be dumber today than 30-odd years
ago? I still hold to that, and, if anything, it only seems to have gotten worse
in the half-decade I’ve been doing this job. Also, the number of mentally ill
people roaming the streets seems to have increased, at least in our
formerly-quiet part of the world, and the severity of their illnesses also
seems to have worsened.
By the end of a day of driving bat-shit crazy and bag of
hammers-dumb people around, I had no energy whatsoever left for job searching,
so that quickly fell by the wayside. Before that happened, however, I did try
to keep up on my GIS skills. I often had long breaks between my split shifts.
It was not economically feasible or practical from a safety viewpoint to try to
commute home and back again during those splits. If the weather was amenable, I
might nap in my car or in an empty bus at the yard. Otherwise, I was stuck in
College Town with nothing to do for several hours.
I approached the good folks at the City of College Town GIS
department and volunteered my services, much as I had done with Jesse in
O-Town. Just like Jesse, they were happy to have the free help. I did that for
a little while, but then my schedule changed. We have new “bids” every three or
four months, mainly because whether or not the university is in session has a
big impact on the number of riders. Mainly, there are two “student shuttle”
routes, which do not operate when the college is “out”, such as the spring, summer
and winter breaks. This being a union job, seniority is very important. The
drivers of those student shuttles (usually the same two guys year after year) are
entitled to bid for a schedule with sufficient hours during the college’s down
times, and that is why we all bid four times a year. As a new guy, I didn’t
have a lot of options about what I got to bid on, so I had to take what I could
get, and that is why my schedule changed so dramatically. I could never be sure
what I would be doing from one quarter to the next, so I had to give up on the
idea of volunteering at the city GIS department.
We also relocated from O-Town to College Town about a year
after I started driving bus. We had contemplated moving to reduce the amount of
time and money I spent on commuting, but it didn’t seem worth the effort and
expense of finding a new place and packing. Then our landlord and lady made up
our minds for us. It wasn’t an eviction, per se. I admit, we had been pushing
the limits of their patience for a while. Our current house was only three
bedrooms, and it was just supposed to be Mrs. Rimpington and I and our two
biological children living there.
However, Step-Rimpyette hadn’t had much luck in the
relationship department. She had broken up with Grandrimpy’s father, and she
and her son came to stay with us. It was just supposed to be temporary. She
slept in the living room, and we put Grandrimpy in a reluctant Rimpy Jr.’s
room, which had a bunk bed.
SR soon met another guy (whom I shall call DSB – for “Devil’s
Stinky Ballsack”) and…well…ended up pregnant by him. She had been careful about
birth control, but this unscrupulous fellow later admitted that he so badly
wanted to start a family that he had poked holes in her diaphragm with a
needle. So DSB got the kid he wanted (which wasn’t his first, by the way), but
it turned out he was no good at providing support for a family. He was just a
total loser. Unfortunately SR didn’t realize this in time to avoid marrying the
guy. All she wanted was a legitimate spouse and legal father for her second
child.
SR’s pregnancy with Grandrimpyette 1 was rough on her, and
GR1 ended up being delivered by Caesarean two months early, at the same
hospital in Sacramento where Rimpyette had been born.
SR and DSB tried to make a go of living together, but it
ultimately failed miserably. So SR and her now two children were back in our
home. Some ugly custody battles ensued between SR and GR1’s father, which SR
barely won with her sanity intact.
One month lead to another, than a few years went by. SR went
through some rough times while trying to recover from her traumatic
relationship with DSB. She met a Hmong man with a vast past. He was good to SR,
but it was obvious he was never going to be a financially viable partner. At
least we didn’t have to worry that he would impregnate the imminently pregnable
SR. He had previously been in a long-term relationship with a Hmong woman, and
much to his mother’s dismay, they never produced a child. Finally she had him
tested, and he was diagnosed as sterile. Still, after her past experiences, SR
was taking no chances, and continued to use birth control. Then, one fateful, drunken
night, she let her guard down, and a miracle happened. Apparently “sterile”
doesn’t necessarily mean “totally sperm-free”, and now a third grandchild was
on the way.
SR’s health had not been great since her second pregnancy.
You may recall that she was already having problems when she was working for me
at Osmosis. This last pregnancy really did her in. SR’s doctor decided to
deliver GR2 by Caesarean two weeks before her due date, but SR’s water broke
about a week and a half before then.
Meanwhile, our now grown biological children were having
grown-up relationships of their own, and their significant others moved in with
us. Fortunately, no progeny ensued from any of those relationships. I would
like to have “blood” grandchildren someday, but I can wait a bit longer.
So at the height, we had 10 people living in a three bedroom
house (with only one bathroom). I can’t even remember where everybody slept,
but the living room was definitely doing double-duty as a makeshift fourth
bedroom. All this might not have been so bad if our house had been on a sewer
system rather than a septic tank. The tank just wasn’t built for that many
people, and that was the straw that broke the landlord-camel’s back. They got
fed up with having to pump out the septic tank and our seeming inability to get
SR and her kids into a place of their own. It’s not that we were unwilling, it’s
just that circumstances prevented it. SR had had a bit of trouble while trying
to recover from DSB, and was not eligible for public housing. She was sick and
couldn’t work. There was no way she could afford full rent on assistance,
especially with no support coming from any of her babies’ daddies.
Finally, our landlord, Rich, who was basically a kindly
person at heart, came by while I was at work and gave Mrs. R the news that we
had 60 days to find a new place. They had rather a long conversation about our
situation, by the end of which Rich said we could have 90 days. Then Rich apparently went home and told his
wife (who was not basically a kindly person) what he had done, because he
called Mrs. R and said that it was going to have to be 60 days after all.
Okay. 60 days. After 17 years with the same landlords, we
had eight weeks to find a new place and move into it. I try not to bear them
too much ill will over that. After all, they had owned their house for
probably decades, and couldn’t have any idea what it was like for renters in
this modern world.
90 days would have been better (and kinder), but I figured
we could it in 60. We barely accomplished it, and it nearly killed us. Part of
the problem was that potential landlords had gotten a lot more finicky about
renters since we had last had to find a place. Now credit checks are much more
common, and our credit has never been great. We thought that the fact that we
had been with the same landlords for 17 years would impress potential new
landlords, but it didn’t. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. It
reminded me of when Hank Hill finds out how long an underling at Strickland’s
has been renting, and asks incredulously, “Who rents a house for 20 years?”
Mrs. R finally found an apartment belonging to an agreeable
fellow. It’s in a somewhat dodgy part of town, and hard by the railroad tracks,
which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t also near a crossing, so the frequent
trains have to blow their horns as they pass our building. It was going to be
different, adjusting to apartment living after almost two decades of living in
stand-alone houses with yards. Actually, I was looking forward to the idea of
no longer being responsible for yard care. The backyard at our last house was
quite large, but only about a quarter of that was livable lawn. The rest was
wild grasses and weeds. When the wild part finally dried out during the summer,
it wasn’t much trouble right through the winter, but I dreaded the spring when
the new growth came in with a vengeance.
Another complicating factor in our move was that poor Mrs. R
got pneumonia and was in the hospital for several days just as were switching
homes, so I was on my own trying to wrangle all the other inhabitants into some
semblance of order. Mrs. R got released from the hospital just in time to walk
through our now empty former home to say goodbye to it. We had been there for
11 years. Our children had grown from actual children to adults there. Just
before she went into the hospital, we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary
in the midst of all packing. It was a bittersweet time full of conflicting emotions
and stresses.
Man, we had accumulated a lot of junk in those 11 years
(plus the six years at the previous house, where we’d had almost nothing when
we moved in, after a few years of gypsy-like living). We rented a 4 cubic yard
dumpster and filled it to overflowing with discarded items. Even then, we weren’t
able to fit what was left into our new place, and had to rent a storage unit.
There has always been something reprehensible to me about our culture’s
accumulative nature, and what a huge industry self-storage has become. It kills
me to have to shell out money to someone else to protect our excess stuff, but
I can’t seem to whittle it all down to a less profligate amount.
At last we settled into our new apartment, and now we’ve
been here almost four years. Rimpy Jr. broke up with his significant other
here, and that was rough. He has since relocated to Portland, Oregon, where we
plan on moving in a couple of years. Grandrimpy got old enough to get his own
significant other, who moved in with us, so there are now nine people under
this roof, only one less than the previous domicile, but at least we are spread
out over four rooms instead of three (and two bathrooms), so the living room only
sometimes functions as a guest bedroom.
That catches us up on current events. So what have I learned
from all this living and working and writing about it? In the introduction to
this project, I told the story of an addle-pated woman who had a hard time
remembering how to pay her fare on the bus as she commuted to beautician school,
and my impatience with her and her slowness. I don’t know what became of that
lady. I like to think that she graduated from beauty college and went on to a
better life, but I’ll probably never know.
When I wrote that introduction nearly a year ago, I wondered
why I was such an impatient butt, and who I was I to talk, anyway - a guy who
got hired for 85 different jobs over the course of 35 years? Were the two
things somehow related? I think they are.
My parents were both critical in their own ways, but my
father was by far the worse. He managed to make me feel like I’d be worthless
if I didn’t match his idea of how a man should conduct himself in this life. He
did some things right in his life. He was a responsible worker and a homeowner
and paid his bills. There is nothing wrong with that. But nobody liked him. He’s
been gone a long time now, and all anyone remembers about him is how he made
them feel about themselves - which was never “good”. The world he’s no longer a
part of doesn’t care about his good credit or what he owned.
For my part, I took a convoluted path in dealing with how he
made me feel. Like many children, instead of saying, “I’m never going to make
MY children feel bad about themselves”, I repeated the behaviors I’d seen
modeled. I’ve had to work hard to change that behavior in my personal
relationships, but I’m still prone to dickishness when dealing with co-workers
and passengers. After my disastrous turn as a foreman with Osmosis (you know,
when I fired my own step-daughter?), I have had no interest in any kind of
supervisorial position. Being a bus driver is no picnic, but I don’t think I
could handle even the little bit of power that would come with a higher
position - like dispatcher, trainer or safety supervisor.
In general, I rebelled against my hyper-critical father’s
ideas of what makes a successful man by being about as irresponsible when it
came to work and personal finance as I could get. Paradoxically, however, when
I did work, I usually tried to do the best job I could at whatever it was. That
may have been a combination of nature and nurture (if you can call my father’s
approach to parenting “nurturing”). I think I have a naturally strong work
ethic, plus I had seen it modeled by both my parents. I just wish it hadn’t
taken me so long to come to grips with my feelings about my father and buckle
down to being a grown-up. Ah well. Better late than never, I suppose.
It hasn’t been easy accepting my current position in life. I
can’t escape the nagging feeling that I could have done better than being a bus
driver this late in life. Sometimes I have despaired when I felt like this is
all I have to look forward to until I retire. But I’ve managed to hang in
there. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been five years. When I hit that anniversary,
my wages suddenly jumped from less than I was making at my previous job at
Intersection to more. Finally I’m making a decent living, but it’s sort of a
double-edged sword. Even if I found a job that was more amenable in working
conditions, it probably wouldn’t pay as much as I’m making now. This is the
risk I’m taking with our planned relocation to Portland. If I get the job I
want up there, it will pay less than I’m currently making, at least for a
little while, so that could be rough. I’ve gotten gun-shy about making risky
moves with employment, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
So now I’m a stable worker, but I still struggle with being
critical of others. I try to remember that poor beauty college student and her
struggles with tickets. We all have struggles. It’s how we deal with ours and
how it affects our interactions with others that defines us, and I’m trying to
make a better definition for myself.
The end.
P.S.: It’s mostly been fun writing this, but it has been
hard, too. Now comes the really hard work of going back over this and trying to
work it into a book someone would want to read (and pay for the privilege of
doing so). Wish me luck.
