I spent four hours last night riding the 2nd Friday trolley around Norman, giving out chocolate in honor of the opening of the exhibition, which is today. For those outside the area: on the 2nd Friday of every month, the Norman galleries, museums and music venues host the 2nd Friday Circuit of Art. There are openings, performances, and a general sense of Happening around the old downtown area and campus corner. The public transit system, CART, provides a trolley that makes a loop around the area every half hour from 6 to 10 p.m. For $2, you can get on and off the trolley as many times as you like, all evening long.
And that's where I was, parked on the bench behind my driver, Al, with a basket of chocolate in my hands and a big banner announcing the exhibition "Chocolate" behind me. For four hours I rode in a circle around Norman, greeted riders with free chocolates as they boarded, and chatted with people between stops.
You learn a lot about people when you ride the bus all evening. The 2nd Friday trolley is like a little traveling village. Folks get on for a few stops, are joined by others for a stop or two and then disembark. They are replaced by new faces, or maybe some returning villagers from earlier in the evening. I was there for all of them. I'd say "hey! Welcome back!" and chat with them or their kids, ask questions about how the evening was going, talk about the exhibit. Everyone has a story to tell.
I met an older couple who inspect fire gear on the buses. The man was quite garrulous, and picked up his conversation without missing a beat each time they re-boarded the bus. He told me about the chocolate houses he makes at the holidays with his grandkids, where in Oklahoma you can go for the best fossil hunting, how to dig selenite crystals on the salt plains so you get the biggest clusters. I told them where to go for rose rocks on Draper Lake (thanks, Bob), and encouraged them to join the museum so they could come to Members Night.
I met a couple with a daughter about 7 or 8 who were museum members and talked with me about how much they enjoy visiting, and chimed in on other conversations as they ebbed and flowed. I met a man who was a former courier for DHL and Fed Ex who told me he had been looking to get a part-time job at the museum and wondered if anything was coming open this summer. As the provider of Free Chocolate, I had a particular appeal to kids, and two separate little girls made a point of sitting beside me and chatting me up, showing me the tissue paper flowers they had made at the Fred Jones museum and asking shyly if they can have more chocolate. (of course they can)
Most talkative of all, however, was my driver, Al. Al is a big man with a white buzz-cut and a gentle nature. He's been driving buses of one kind of another for an accumulated 31 years. He's a retired airforce radio man, went to Korea, did five tours of Vietnam, and has visited all 50 states and 52 countries. (To be fair, he told me when he was in the airforce if they landed on an airbase in a country, they counted it as "visiting.")
He asked if I was married, and when I told him I was divorced he said he was sorry, and I said thanks, that it has been tough, but we would be fine. "Well, that statement there is why I know you will be fine," he said. He said that he understood how difficult it was because his first wife cheated on him while he was in Korea, so they got divorced. He got a record of medical tests in the mail from their doctor, and couldn't make out what they meant, so he took them to the doc on base, who reluctantly interpreted them for him: "You have to promise me you're not going to tear up my desk," he said first, then: "your wife has contracted a social disease."
"So we went through a divorce," he told me. "I guess she just couldn't be without somebody."
He's been married to his second wife for 29 years, which is how long he has been in Norman. When I told him my great-grandparent's names, he knew more about my family than I did: who was married to who, who was dead, who moved away.
As we rode – the first two loops were completely devoid of other passengers – he pointed out where all the stops were and commented on the route and the traffic. The trolley is old and rattles and "drives like a freight train," he told me. When he had to make a right turn he always swung wide to keep from hitting the curb, and would encourage drivers at the intersecting street who were signaling a right turn to go ahead and turn ahead of him so he wouldn't have to cut it any closer. He'd talk to people: "Come on. No, no, just go ahead. I'm trying to give you room."
He kept a mental talley of his passengers, and worried on the last loop that one man with his three daughters hadn't gotten back on to return to where he first picked them up. "I hate to think I'd left anyone stranded," he said. And he told me about regular passengers he has on his day route: a professor who spends every other week in Dallas; a ten-year-old boy who always catches the bus from his middle school down to the Weather Center where his mother works, and the drivers all know him and watch for him. "We look after him," he said. "We may be a bunch of worried old hens, but we know he's supposed to be on that 4:00 bus, and if he's not then we start to look for him."
At a light on campus corner he commented "must be Friday night in Norman." And when I asked him what he meant he told me there was a pair of men (said slightly archly, with a "you know what I mean" tone) who, at some point on every Friday night, came out of Louie's on the corner of Asp and Boyd and went down the block into another bar. "Every single Friday, just like clockwork. You know it's Friday if you see them. You know, people have patterns they run, even if they think they don't."
Well, if anyone would know about patterns, it would be a bus driver. Around and around he goes, noticing what's the same and what's different, memorizing the faces and the habits, chatting people up. It was an interesting evening. Tiring, but interesting. Never take your bus driver for granted.
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