Bus Rides 3

Sometimes a whole bunch of kids from an elementary school get in the bus. All the kids seem to be from some other country. The kids outfits are the cutest. Pink leggings, purple coats, yellow smiley faces, and sparkly sneakers.The loners among the kids stare out the window. The bus becomes lively with their presence and chatter. My destination is always down town interchange. Down town interchange is a hub of buses. All buses come here. Buses are parked on both sides of the street. Bus numbers 5, 6, 8, and 13 in addition to 10 and 12 are a few I have noticed. There are innumerable yellow and black striped buses, and there are blue buses that go to the nearby village of coralville. Earlier there was a slogan painted on some of the yellow and black buses. The slogan was Changing Medicine; Changing Lives. Larger than life portraits of doctors in white coats and nurses in green hospital uniform are painted on the buses. These painted portraits smile at you from the sides of the buses. One day I was waiting at the downtown interchange bus stop. I was waiting for bus number 10 or 12, to reach me to the bus stop in the Mormon Trek road. It was then that I saw a different sort of bus parked on the other side of the road. This was an orange and black bus with swathes of red. This bus was perhaps huger than a regular bus. On it with white letters were written the words Renewable Energy and Creating a Sustainable future. Presumably the renewable energy buses do not depend on fossil fuels such as gas. They may not give out poisonous emissions like regular automobiles. The windows and doors of the renewable energy buses are not detectable. They look like a smooth composite whole. As I stared at the orange and black renewable energy bus even as I was waiting for the white bus with the orange stripe at the edge of a park full of trees I entered into a sort of reverie about life in a bus. It was the sight of the renewable energy buses that made me think of an RV. I have never been inside an RV but the idea of living in a bus--eating, sleeping, reading, writing, watching videos and studying in a bus has been appealing to me ever since I first heard about it during my childhood. In an RV the journeys are long. Innumerable kilometers are crossed while time elapses and days become weeks, months and years all spent in an RV. We can look out the window and see the vastness of the universe in the trees, forests, the huge mountains and the sky. In my real life there was school, home work, schedules, activities and here was a life style of being unfettered from all of these. No having to memorize long poems, write down things from the black board and memorize them at home and solve math problems. Instead we can sit in an RV and life becomes an unending vacation or a never ending journey. Outside is the vast wilderness-- forests of trees. But inside in the plush seats of buses there is tranquility to be found. We can celebrate birthdays in buses, play board games, watch movies or look out the window.