Stories from the Stringam Family Ranches of Southern Alberta

From the 50s and 60s to today . . .



Thursday, February 22, 2018

Speaking Bus

I lived in the country.
We rode the bus to school.
[When our bus driver managed to meet their bus driver and an exchange could be negotiated.]
Just a little background: We lived 20 miles from town. The bus driver refused to drive the entire distance. Instead, he agreed to meet us at a corner nine miles from our ranch.
Hence the name 'Nine-Mile Corner'.
You wonder how these things get titled?
Well, now you know.
Mom was usually chosen as 'Harried Driver #1' shuttling sleepy offsrping into the car, then hare-ing down the road at sixty-miles-an-hour to facilitate the aforementioned meeting.
Usually we were on time.
But that only meant there was a possibility of meeting the bus because Mr. Bus Driver often went the other way.
Sigh.
But that has nothing to do with this story . . .
Mentioning Kathy yesterday reminded me of . . . Kathy.
Okay, yes. I'm predictable.
Now riding on the bus can be long and boring.
One can stare out the window and see exciting things: A coyote. Antelope.
The occasional pheasant.
But most of the time it is merely: Prairie.
Beautiful. But repetitious.
So Kathy would make up her own entertainment.
And she was good at it.
On this occasion, she introduced me to Bus Script. Or Bus Writing as it was also known.
Okay, you have to know that we sometimes did homework on the bus.
And our writing was affected by the bounce and jounce of the great lumbering vehicle as it negotiated sketchy gravel roads.
So Kathy made the writing the thing.
She would hold her pencil at the approved angle and then just move it across the page.
The bus actually did the writing.
Genius. Right?
I can't tell you how many scribblers I used up in this pursuit.
A few.
And somehow, I just can't help but think that, if I truly knew how to speak 'bus', the vehicle and I could have had a legitimate conversation.
Who knows what I could have learned?
Thanks, Kathy.

9 comments:

  1. People who never rode the old daily bus have no idea what it's about. I saw many of the little guys go to sleep on the bus in the afternoon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah. I was one of them. But that is another story . . .

      Delete
  2. I thought I was the only person who tried out Bus Script. I never quite got the hang of it, though and it was on a city bus where I grew up in New York City - I never road a school bus as a student, not once.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You missed something, Alana! But then, I never rode a city bus. Not once!

      Delete
  3. Somehow now I'm thinking about monkeys and typewriters and the likelihood of the former using the latter to produce anything but chaos. And just to be clear, you and Kathy were NOT the monkeys in this analogy, the bus was! You and Kathy were the ones I would've liked to sit with!

    ReplyDelete
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