Bus based retrospectives

I never once saw my grandparents drive a car. Growing up in Pasadena during the 1980s in the near heart of L.A.'s car culture made my grandparents' not driving stand out to me in a retro kind of way. When they couldn't get a ride from one of their adult children or their increasingly numerous driver's license equipped grandchildren, they took the public bus system. Both my grandparents used the buses in a practical and well thought out way.


But my grandfather added his own personal touch to the role of the bus in his life. Well into his 88th year, at least six days a week, gramps quite literally took the bus to the furthest reaches of L.A. County. From his non air conditioned perch in Pasadena, with a copy of the Spanish language newspaper La Opinion tucked under his arm, he journeyed out to places as far as the port of Long Beach, the ocean bound fringes of the Westside, and (after my parents moved us there) as far east as smogged out Covina, which back then took at least three different bus transfers to get to from the Dena.


Many times gramps left the house to ride the bus for no more practical purpose than the freedom it gave him to be on the move. He loved to see, touch, experience, and learn about the physical world around him. He'd be out the door in the early morning and he'd always be home for dinner by 5 p.m. or so, but in between he would have transported himself somewhere different and far. In his travels he'd get in some four to five miles of walking a day making his way to a noise filled cacophony of geographically diverse bus stops. I am sure doing so helped keep him fit, which he stayed until his death at age 89.


In retrospect what makes me respect my grandfather's constant movement even more is that he accomplished all this bus ride adventuring while speaking as close to zero English as a person can after having lived in the U.S. for over twenty years. I never heard him say more than Hi and Bye in English, but somehow he cracked the code of the MTA bus schedule, the jumbled nomenclature of a million street signs, the gruff announcements of upcoming corner stops by harried bus drivers, and the mysteries of the McDonald's food menu.


Speaking of McDonald's, all that walking allowed my grandfather the daily luxury of a hamburger and fries that he learned how to order without mustering linguistic effort on his part. How he accomplished such communication jiu jitsu is one of the minor lingering mysteries of family lore, but he sure did it with practical flair.


My grandfather's particular mastery of the L.A. county bus system was instructive about his life in another sense. Much earlier chronologically in his life and much further away in Peru he had learned how to drive and he had driven quite a bit. But my grandfather drank too much back then and one day in the 1940s, as the story goes, he had a drunk driving incident during a local town festival that almost resulted in the fatality of a woman pedestrian. He was arrested by the town constable and spent months incarcerated. Coming out on the other side of that experience, my grandfather was, in the lingo of a latter decade, "scared straight" and he never got into a car driver's seat again for the rest of his life, a period of time spanning over fifty years.


After I got my own driver's license, I periodically drove my grandfather to his medical appointments. At one point during these years before his death I came to own a used 1986 Honda Prelude, a two door sports coupe that I remember as a teenager thinking was the sleekest ride I had ever seen in person. One afternoon in 1999 or so I gave my grandfather a ride to his doctor's visit. This day being the first time he had ever ridden in the Prelude, he asked me what kind of car it was. When I told him it was a Honda, the most amazed and amused look crossed his face. He let out a small chuckle and said he could remember from his own youth that the only Hondas he had ever known were cheap diminutive bicycles, and now he was in this full fledged blue driving machine. He marveled aloud at the distance traveled in transportation engineering from then to that moment with me in the Prelude.


I always wondered to myself if he had not also been thinking of the way so much else changed in the world around him while he kept pace as best he could, with his steady and sure footspeed, his folded copy of the MTA bus schedule, and the La Opinion newspaper tucked under his arm.