I see in the news where they are tearing down the downtown bus station. This may not mean much to some people, but the bus station has special meaning to my family and probably not for the reasons you might guess. Like most kids growing up I occasionally got in a little trouble and had to face the old man. For guys my age, it was not unusual to end up on the wrong end of a belt back in the day. Neither was it that unusual to end up on the wrong end of a back hand. But for my brothers and I, it was not unusual to end up on the wrong side of town. My dad liked to mix up his methods of punishment. At some point he became bored with same old corporal punishment, so he occasionally would just drop us off at the bus station to spend the night. Yep, apparently my dad was a pioneer of the scared straight movement. Just how effective this form of punishment might be is debatable, because there is always a matter of perspective. To my mom, it might have seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. To my dad, he probably though it inventive and a life lesson. To myself, I just thought it was a big dirty Safe Home. My dad and mom grew up dirt poor, they knew very well the lessons of how fortunate we were. I grew up on the corner of Hickorystick Rd. and Lamp Post Lane. I was way too stupid and sheltered to get the full effect of the lesson I was supposed to be learning at 2 a.m. in the bus station. I guess I always believed dad would show up early in the morning for a long, quiet drive home. This lesson was wasted on the naive. I could not grasp the reality of the men sleeping on the concrete floor, that they didn’t live somewhere similar to the corner of Hickorystick and Lamp Post. When my brother told me they were homeless I just figured I wouldn’t waste any knock knock jokes on them. It should have made an impression on me when the old man approached me with a styrofoam cup saying he was looking for a little change. Instead I asked why he couldn’t accept things the way they were. A time or two my dad even went as far as to buy bus tickets to Amarillo. Years later I began to wonder, maybe if he was actually buying bus tickets, this was not just a “teachable moment”, maybe he wanted my butt in Amarillo. No offense to the people of Amarillo, but apparently dad thought Amarillo was hell on earth. Prison is just a halfway house for people leaving Amarillo. People don’t move to Amarillo, they are sent there. Probably on a Greyhound. And when they get there, if they are lucky, they sneak into the prison. So when they demolish the old downtown bus station, I might have to go down there. There will probably be a sentimental crowd, grieving the demise of the old building. I can’t say I will share their sentiment. I once had a knife pulled on me in the Kansas City bus station. I may be leaning more to the “burn, baby, burn” sentiment myself.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 03:32:39 +0000
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