the bus stop

I met a lady tonight.
Her name was Ann, and she told me the secret of life.

We were standing at the bus stop together, waiting for that 71A, and started talking, just to pass the time. I told her I was a little chilly, and a grandma in action in addition to looks, she pulled two tootsie rolls from her pocket.
"Here, these'll warm you up."
I hesitated, still obedient to that classic childhood lesson to never take candy from strangers.
"They're clean," she said, sensing my discomfort, and I took them from her, feeling silly, and placed them in my pocket.


I asked her where she was going. "Home," she replied.
She'd been out cake-shopping for her son's birthday. She said she lived pretty far, and had to transfer buses along the way.


I told her I went to Pitt; she said she had gone to Carlow.
"I was originially pre-med. You might think this is silly, but since my parents had a lot of kids, I changed to med-tech to save them the expense of school."


Ann told me that she grew up with six brothers, and that living with them had taught her that "men are just like us. They hurt, too."




Ann and I chatted for awhile. The bus was nowhere to be found.


She said she'd broken her femur bone once. I told her so had I.
Strange, the femur bone.
"It's the biggest bone in the body,you know," she said.
I did, I told her. She made me swear that I'd get a bone density test. I would, I told her.


"Do you want to hear a funny little story?" asked the woman standing at the bus stop with a cane in her hand and a lifetime of knowledge behind her.
"Sure,"I smiled.

One day not so long ago, Ann told me, her daughter, her fourth child, called her up to tell her thankyou.
"I didn't send you anything. Maybe it was one of your siblings..." she recalled her confusion at the seemingly random expression of gratitude.
But her daughter was not calling to thank Ann for a gift sent through the mail. But rather, she was calling to thank her mother for her strength. For living her life for her children, all those years, instead of for herself.
"I said it was no big deal," Ann went on. "I told her that it was never something I thought much about. I did it out of habit--it just felt natural," Ann shrugged with humility in the chilly autumn air.


She had lost her husband, and was forced to finish raising their five children alone. He'd been in an accident, and was paralyzed from the neck down. One day after church, she got the phone call, and had to decide in what hospital to place her husband.

"I didn't want to choose," she said.
But she had to. Ann visited her husband faithfully everyday at Saint Margaret's Hospital in Pittsburgh.

Ann was approached two separate times by two different priests from her church. The men were concerned that she'd be devastated when her husband died. The hospital had contacted the priests, saying that Ann seemed "too peppy"when she was at the hospital with her husband. They feared that she did not realize the seriousness of her husband's condition.

She did.

"Too peppy. What else would you be when you're visiting a sick person?" she pondered out loud to me.

Over her husband's three month stay in the hospital, Ann's bills skyrocketed. "They were millions," she said, and it didn't seem an exaggeration.

She said she felt blessed for the time she and her family had with him.
"God gave us the time to prepare. We knew we'd have to go on living without him," she said, and I sensed that she was still going at that task everyday.


To make that devastating time even harder on the family, Ann's son was in threat of being forced out of school, for having missed so much while home with his dying father.

So Ann went to school for him.

"We worked it out with the University, and I went to all the classes and took all the notes for him," she said.

"Wow," was all I could mutter.

"No, not 'wow," she continued. "The last thing you want to do when your husband is dying and your bills are piling up is go back to school," she chuckled, perhaps to avoid the alternative.
"But I knew I had to help him..."




"My daughter told me I should write a book," Ann changed the subject, shifting her bag and cane around to get more comfortable. We had been waiting for the bus now for what seemed almost an hour. "I barely have time to sit down, though!"
I looked in admiration at the vivacious woman before me.
"...Your book is just starting," she said to me, a mere child in comparison with herself.




Finally the bus came. It was crowded, and a man had to give up his seat in order for Ann to have somewhere to sit down. I stood across the aisle from her, hanging onto the support bar. I wondered if our conversation was over, silently hoping it was not.

"Can you fit over here by me?" she called out, doing her darndest to open up another seat where there was none. I gladly accepted, and squeezed in next to her. The lady on the other side of me leaned away, trying to make room.
"No, stay here, stay here," Ann said to her, reaching her arm out to the woman. She gestured to me "This girl's freezin'!"

I laughed to myself, enveloped by the warmth of the stranger and Ann, as I pulled a tootsie roll from my pocket.




My destination was nearing, and there was a question burning inside me. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure, go ahead," she smiled, welcoming my question.
"How did you know you...wanted to marry your husband...?" I asked awkwardly, wondering inwardly if my own boy would meet whatever her criteria had been.
"You mean, how did I know he was the one?" she verified with me.
I nodded, anxious to hear her reply.


She said that it took her awhile to date him. She told him he was too young for her.
"He was persistent, though," Ann said. So eventually she accepted his offer to go out.

They got along well,and started to see one another regularly. One evening, he suggested they go to bowl with a league in town. She agreed, and they had a great time.

The next week, he suggested they go bowling again. She told him no, that she thought maybe he should go with someone else.
"I only wanted to go to be with you..." he had said, confused.
But Ann was adament.

"You have to be able to go places without eachother and feel comfortable," she said. "I told him to go, meet new people. I even tried coming up with other girls he might want to date," she continued.

I listened, perplexed, trying to take in all of what she was saying.

"In short, I let him go," Ann said.

She paused, and I remained quiet, pondering her response, much more nuanced and layered than I was expecting.

"Does that answer your question?"




Two stops past mine, I finally told Ann I had to go. I didn't want to leave her, this new friend of mine, but I knew I'd be hopelessly lost if I didn't get off the bus in a familiar area. But then, a part of me felt thatI'd be hopelessly lost without asking her just a few more questions...




Ann told me I was a lovely girl, and that she hoped she'd see me again, and I thought I caught a glimpse of youth still thriving in her eyes.

I reciprocated her kind words, and thanked the driver as I stepped down onto the sidewalk. I looked up into the bus window while turning to walk away, and saw her looking out at me.

She smiled, and I smiled back at her.

And then the bus doors closed, and Ann and I went our separate ways, both perhaps a little changed, I like to think.