On any sort of trip, saying goodbye is often frustratingly anticlimactic. I envision a tearful embrace, a final set of memory-sharing and promises to stay in touch, a picturesque wave as the train bears one away from the other.
Although I’ve had some fantastic farewells in my time, all too often, goodbyes on the road are rushed by the urgency to catch a train or hop from one car to the next. So it was with Mary and me. We barely made it to the bus stop in time, and then I scrambled onto it and turned back for a frantic wave through the window. My bus zipped off. I left my baby sister stranded in LA.
I may or may not have cried on the bus to the Greyhound station.
The eight-hour-and-twenty-minutes Greyhound ride kept me suitably entertained: I watched the jagged brown mountains (Tolkien would have called them “writhen hills”) roll by. I got free onion rings at the Burger King lunch stop. I chatted at my row-mate, a sweet round-faced young woman with a gentle smile who had left her native Mexico for a six-month trip around California (it was her mascara that I remember: speckled along the lids as if applied hurriedly, there was something endearing about it). Then she was replaced by a man who had no concept of “this half of the bench is mine and that is yours”— he sprawled into my personal space, hunched down like a vulture with his t-shirt pulled up over his nose. There’s just never a dull moment on the bus.
I thought about Mary a lot. I wondered how she was doing.
As of this writing, Mary is back in St. Louis for a couple of days— then she’s going back to San Diego, where she will soon start her new job as a costumed character for SeaWorld. This has been her goal for well over a year, and although I’ll miss my sister, I’m so happy she’s gotten the chance to follow her dream in sunny California.
Next time we say goodbye, though, it had better be epic.
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