COVER -> American Dreams
The bus from Denver had just arrived as we were ascending to our seats in the Salt Lake City bus, heading down Interstate 80 across Wyoming. Several people came bounding out of the other bus, as though we would not be waiting to board them had they not made fools of themselves. It was obvious that we would no longer have the large number of empty seats for riding comfort. The bus would be almost full with all these new passengers.
People fussed with their packages and seating as the strangers boarded, hoping against hope that no one would take the vacant aisle seat next to him or her. To no avail. The bus would be full minus two passengers.
I paid the obligatory "good day" to the woman who sat next to me, a thin and energetic seventy year old, I judged, neatly dressed with comfortable sneakers, leg warmers, a long dark blue skirt, a white blouse under a dark and light blue beautifully-knitted sweater.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a small black book beneath them. Her hair was mixed black and gray, long, neatly brushed, then folded and coifed into a ball that sat on the back of her head. Her facial features were very striking: she was a beautiful woman at this age and must have been a beauty when younger, as well.
I had the Prucha book in my lap. She looked at it and said, "Good choice, the best of its kind, but he pulls all his punches at the end. Poor bastard was more of a goody two-shoes priest than a hard-hitting historian."
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I chuckled at her choice of words, and she turned to me and said, "Well, young man, exactly what is so damned funny?"
My reply: "I am no young man. I am fully sixty years old. And I think your reference to yourself as a `sorry-assed alcoholic' is hilarious."
"Not if you lived though it, it wouldn't be. And I am seventy-three, so you are still a young man to me." She tried to look stern, but the corners of her lips curled upward as she tried to stifle a laugh.
"I hope you don't mind my asking, but I have to: what are your ethnic origins?"
"Well, we all have two grandmothers - at least I hope so. But I got a special treat from my two. My father's mother was Irish and Chinese. My mother's mother was German and Cheyenne. I am from a family of forty two children, my dad being a traditional Mormon from Brown's Park, Colorado.
There was my mother and nine more stepmothers. Among the fifty two of us, we almost ate the poor bastard out of house and home.
"I ran away from home when I was fourteen - the place not fit to live in, I thought at the time. I couldn't stand the beatings, either. Spent several years in San Francisco. Went to school there and became a grammar school teacher. Later, when I lived with a merchant marine captain who was from Vermont originally, I moved to Hong Kong and taught school there while he sailed the orient.
"After he died, for a while, during Mao, I lived in China - a great man, Mao. Then back to Hong Kong. The second time in Hong Kong is when I got to drinking. I do not know exactly how it happened, but it did happen that I got back to San Francisco.
"I got to AA in San Francisco and it saved my life, I am sure. I waitressed for over twenty years part-time and did my teaching in San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland and that area. I waitressed because I found that if alcohol were there in front of me publicly, I could say no to it. If I had it in my home when I was alone and down, I would drink. As long as I stayed around drinking people, it seemed I did not have to drink myself.
"Of course, I fell off the wagon repeatedly, but always found a way to get back on. The secret is not, how many times you fail, but rather how many times you turn failure around to success again.
"About fifteen years ago, I reconnected with my family, after no connection for over forty years. My youngest sister just died and I went to her funeral in Loveland, Colorado, and now I am on my way back to Berkeley." She sighed and leaned back.
"So what do you do for excitement in Berkeley these days?" I asked her.
"Oh, I work in a boutique, selling women's clothes, four days a week, four ten-hour days. Not bad for seventy three, wouldn't you admit?"
Well, that accounted for the clothing she wore, the customary duds of women less than half her age - but very attractive on her nonetheless.
After the stop in Rollins, another truck stop, she had a few more things to say.
"I have, in recent years, regretted that I did not settle down at some point, raise a family and do the normal sorts of things. As it is, my contemporaries are mostly dead or in nursing homes - and I simply cannot set foot inside one of those goddam nursing homes - and I am feeling very, very lonely these days. My colleagues are all kind to me, but the oldest of them is less than half my age. I do not feel like one of the girls any more."I really wish I would have tried, at least, to have a family and that now I could relate to real flesh-and-blood offspring. God knows I have had a full life. How many old bitties my age can say that they held hands with the great leader of the Chinese people? How many witnessed the ravages of the Japanese army in China during and after the Second World War?
"I have seen San Francisco go from a small city of finance and trade to the world's largest concentration of gays and lesbians. Helluva full life, I must say. But I do wish I had a family."
When I told her that I lived in Jackson, Wyoming, she said that she wanted to come along with me. I told her that I had to hitchhike from Rock Springs to Jackson. She seemed to be agreeable to that, too. But when we saw that it was below freezing out there, she suddenly had a change of heart. "I have always wanted to see the Tetons first hand, but I am not willing to freeze my ass to do it," was her final decision.
She got up from her seat when we got to Rock Springs. I am quite sure of her final remark. "Have a good life there, sonny," she said with a wink. And, if I am not mistaken, it was her hand that patted my butt as I got out of the seat and turned to walk down the aisle and out of the bus.