Jesuit high school. All-boys. Shirt and tie. A Beanie for freshmen, Catholic guilt baked into the curriculum. Everyone else had cars or rides or parents with flexible schedules. I had the city bus. The H.A.R.T. Line. Hillsborough Area Regional Transit. Big red heart logo, which, after a few sunburned summers, faded to a kind of medical-waste brown. The buses didn’t allow smoking anymore, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t smell the ghost of menthols past—or whatever mysterious stew had been simmering in the vinyl seats since 1983.
Looking back, I’m convinced the whole thing was a character-building exercise from my parents. Some warped suburban rite of passage: “Let the boy take the bus. It’ll either toughen him up or teach him to get better grades.” That, or they just really loved the phrase “twenty-five cents a ride.”
Enter: Diggs. Richard Diggs. Bus #7. We called him Dick Diggs because it felt right. He was a barrel-chested, don’t-make-me-turn-this-bus-around kind of guy. I met him on day one. Fresh shirt. Stiff tie. Armed with a quarter and a lot of misplaced confidence. And, crucially, a beanie. Not the winter kind. The Catholic kind. Freshmen were required to wear them until they earned the right to burn them at Homecoming, like tiny felt sacrifices to the god of upperclassmen.
Diggs took one look at me and said, “That some kind of Jewish hat you got there, son?”
I explained it was tradition. Jesuit thing. Big ceremony. Burning involved. He stared at me like I’d offered to sell him herbal supplements, then nodded like it wasn’t his business anyway. From then on, it was a running bit.
“Where’s that funny Jewish hat today, son?”
“Left it at home.”
“You want I should turn around so you can get it?”
And then he’d repeat it over the loudspeaker. For the benefit of the entire cabin. Because, again: character building.
What I didn’t know was that my dad had decided to tail the bus that first morning. Not in a creepy way—just your standard, deeply loving, vaguely paranoid parenting maneuver. White Blazer. A few cars back. Subtle, or so he thought.
Diggs, however, had seen enough spy movies to know when he was being followed. Before long, we were charging yellow lights and cutting lanes like we were transporting a diplomat with a price on his head. Every sharp turn tossed passengers against the windows like forgotten laundry. The “Stop Requested” ding sounded like a slot machine with a caffeine addiction.
“Someone hitting that button, or is that a real stop?” Diggs bellowed.
Another ding. Another turn.
“Think I got a white guy tailin’ us,” he added, casually, like he was announcing rain.
That’s when I finally got a glimpse out the window.
“That’s my dad!” I shouted.
The words ricocheted through the bus like a gossip wave. Heads turned in slow motion. Diggs looked at me in the rearview.
“Your dad? What kind of kid gets tailed by his own dad?”
The woman next to me—who smelled like menthols and personal truth—leaned in.
“If your dad’s going the same way,” she said, “why the hell didn’t you just ride with him and maybe stop for a McGriddle?”
“I think he just wanted to make sure I got there okay.”
She squinted at me. “Ain’t that hard, kid. You pay, you get on. Push the button when you want off. Simple as that.”
“I guess he wanted to see how long it took.”
“There’s a map.”
“I know.”
“It’s on the wall.”
“Yep.”
“Times and everything.”
“I get it.”
She nodded, satisfied, and leaned back. “You should just get off now and ride with your daddy. Maybe he’ll buy you a milkshake. Or a new hat.”
That quarter didn’t just buy me a seat. It bought me commentary. A cast of characters. The occasional life lesson wrapped in a bus transfer. Some days, I’d have paid fifty cents just to fast-forward to my stop. Other days, I rode a little slower.
The bus would stop near a K-Mart on the way home. Transfer hub. Smelled like plastic and popcorn. But that’s another quarter, another story.