Because of my vision and motor problems I drove for only a brief time in my life. The driving involved brief attempts to learn how to drive which scared my Mother to death. My father once allowed me to drive in North Carolina but it was nothing more than a few rides to nowhere and driving Dad to a place we played tennis and back. So otherwise someone else drove me everywhere I went. Because of the relative affluence of my family at times I took some plane rides. My first hint at how things would go the rest of my life was when I rode the Greyhound from Kansas where I was going to college at the time for over 12 hours to home, and from home to Kansas where I would literally watch the Sun rise and set before I reached the place I was destined to go. I rode through Arkansas where I saw plenty of liquor stores and pawn shops and a lot of desolation. In Missouri there were many lakes. The fumes from the restroom overcame me after a while. On a few trips I went on the interstate from Kansas City to St, Louis. Those trips were the most crowded and sometimes people had to stand or sit. I felt sorry for elderly people trying to use the restrooms as we were like animals in a moving cage, I was fortunate to be sitting on those trips but when I was older I remember trying to stand on the city bus with a bag in my hand. On the Greyhound I heard a conversation between a woman about to join the military and a man telling her what to expect and an African American Korean war veteran and some younger white folks. Later I rode the city bus from near home to work. There I met the seedier element of my hometown. There was a guy bragging about how he stole clothes from a local store, a guy who talked about training new gang recruits, and a man who was trying to justify beating up his girlfriend after catching her in bed with another man. There were some well dressed men who were looking for jobs. However this hopeful site turned hopeless when they talked incessantly about getting high. I never saw them again. And there of course were the beggars who would ask for money. I occasionally saw couples on the bus but most of the riders were loners like me. I even met a few other mentally ill people on there as you may expect too. My Mother once told me that I could have a girlfriend but I had to ride with her on the bus. I didn’t even bother to ask one out to do that. I still hoped that I would drive some day. I guess it would have been interesting to ask the one lady who was chasing me around at that time for a laugh but I think she expected me to go further than I was going in life. If I were in Europe or a place with a better public transportation system I would have had a more normal life. But for right now I accept the embarrassment of having my Mom driving me around because after she’s gone it will be the public transportation system I’ll be on and it will be no fun.
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