The Fedora Chronicles - V. Bee - "WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE"

V. Bee offers her fellow readers another slice of life from “The Golden Era” and asks Can to you turn a blind eye to...

"WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE!"

By V. Bee

During my many years of walking this earth, I have held a variety of jobs. I’ve been a computer operator, a data entry clerk, a telemarketer for a diverse amount of businesses, an editorial assistant, a co-editor for a monthly magazine (still am), a wife, a mother and a secretary. Pretty much routine. But the hardest job I every held was driving a city bus.

Driving a bus nearly killed me. I couldn’t hang. The general public are, for the most part, the most discourteous and ungracious bunch of people walking this planet. The general public does not, for the most part, view a bus driver another human being, but rather some robot behind the wheel to get them from point A to point B. I rode buses most of my young adult life....I always thought it looked easy.... Thanks to a very concerned friend (at that time), I’m here to tell you... it’s really not easy at all.

I could write on and on and on and on about different experiences I had while I was driving a bus, which was back before some of you FC readers were just born!. However, I won’t bore you with all the sordid details. But I will tell you this story, because it is a story of how human physiology can be entirely twisted...

Along the route I used to do drive on every Saturday for about a year, there lived a set of identical twins, Mary and Marie. Both girls were born blind. One got around with a cane, the other had a German Shepard seeing eye dog named Ginger. Each Saturday, Marie and Ginger would board my bus at Berwyn and Broadway and get off on Rosemont and Broadway. I also used to see Marie with her guide dog in the neighborhood restaurants. Ginger was quiet and well behaved...you never even knew she was under the table.

Well, just like humans and all living creatures, eventually Ginger got old (she was already 6-7 when I first saw them together) and had to be put to sleep because she could no longer walk. Naturally, the school that trains seeing eye dogs for the blind got Marie another dog shortly thereafter..... and did they get her a DOG. A two-year old male black-and-tan German Shepard. He must have weighed 120 pounds easy. Needless to say, he was quite a handful for Marie, who in the beginning had a hard time controlling him. To make matters more difficult, Sampson - that was the dog’s name - was extremely protective of Marie and would make low growling noises if someone got too close.

One Saturday afternoon, I picked up Marie and Sampson at their usual corner. I had a standing load of passengers. It was nearly impossible for me to see in my rear view mirror, and I couldn’t tell what was going on in back of the bus at all. When Marie and Sampson got on, a guy who was sitting in the first seat got up and let Marie have his seat. Sampson went underneath her legs and laid down.

The next thing I knew, an elderly woman, who was sitting about 2-3 seats to the left of Marie and the dog, began yelling at Marie in a foreign language and started poking the dog in the ribs! A male passenger, who was standing behind my seat, explained to me that the elderly woman didn’t like dogs and didn’t like it when Marie wouldn’t get up and get the dog away from this woman. Sampson, who understandably did not appreciate being poked with the cane, started that growl from deep down.... he was up on all fours. I guess that’s when the elderly woman got a take for just how big Sampson was, judging from the look that was on her face when I stood up in my seat.

I pulled the bus over. I got up out of the driver’s chair. I calmly walked over and took the elderly woman’s can away from her and carried it back with me back to the driver’s seat.

A cheer went up in the crowd. Evidently, the show had been going on for a while before I’d noticed. The woman was furious. “Give me back my cane! - I need it to walk!” she screamed at me. Calmly, I answered, “You’ll get it back when you need it.” Which was two stops after Marie and Sampson were to get off my bus. “I’m going to report you!” she shouted at me.

I wrote my badge number, run number, time of the day and name on a piece of paper and handed it to her via another passenger. Ten or twelve passengers wrote the same information down on their own pieces of paper so that they could write to the company and commend me for my actions.

Go figure. Do the right thing, and good things will come.... Do the wrong thing, and.....

Well, you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?

For more articles by V. Bee, visti her archives...
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