The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face. Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas. The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight. She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.
Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car. If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint. But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk. Oh, I can drive. Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely. But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago. The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.
Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both. A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable. On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.