My father drove, anxiously, to the park-and-ride so we could get the bus up to the Port Authority, as he believed that the only bus that hour would be at 9:10 and he believed his dashboard clock which was several minutes ahead of time by the WCBS News Radio clock. Actually the bus we wanted was for 9:18, and if we missed that the next would be 9:22. Still, he hurried and dropped me off at the front of the parking lot to buy tickets while he looked for a parking space somewhere in the back which, he sincerely believes, is what you must have if you don't have commuter tags. While we huddled in the shelter and underneath the ``heat lamps'' that provide the mocking implication of heat my father started chatting up the other guy standing there. It turned out that this guy lived on the same street as my parents' first home together after they were married (and thus my first home). I don't know how he does it.
For the ride up although I was ready and stocked with a paperback to read (is it my imagination or is it harder finding mass-market paperback nonfiction if you don't go in for True Crime?) my father kept finding things to say about the scenery, describing how things were when he was growing up. Much as I had described my biography to 
bunny_hugger riding this road so my father did, although his goes back farther to times that an apparently ordinary strip mall was the strip mall, worth going all the way from the city four miles up the road, even if people were upset about how its building had forced a goose farm and a goat farm out of business.
We're not positive but we suspect we were sitting in a seat which was meant to fold up for wheelchair access. The main evidence for this is that it kind of slid front and back a little more than you might expect. But we got off the bus and at the Port Authority much faster than I ever manage when taking the bus in on a weekend. Apparently we completely missed the rush hour by setting out from just after nine am.
Trivia: More than a quarter the Basque population is Rh factor negative. Source: The Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky.
Currently Reading: Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler.
