The end of the day was nearing, and all I had to do to arrive home was step off the Green Line and walk another eight blocks.
Sure, it was freezing and the snow had left ice patches strewn on the sidewalk, but at the bottom of my Ridgeland stop I could see a CTA bus waiting.
Making that connection meant no walking through the snow, fighting through the cold or waiting for what would seem like an eternity for the next bus. A horde of people stepped off the train, eager to get on the waiting bus.
Only it didn’t wait. With dozens of customers literally feet away, the bus took off.
I’m not talking about a bus that casually pulled away. This driver let a couple of people on, shut the door on others and then made an illegal right turn on red to make his escape.
Now, if I wasn’t slower than nearly all motorized vehicles, I would have ran that bus down. Instead, I cursed him out with some others then trudged home through the ice and cold and told this horrible tale to my wife and her friend, Cristin McAlister, who was visiting at the time.
A couple of days later, Cristin called. She had her own story of bus driver desertion.
For these purposes, there are two things you need to know about Cristin other than that she’s a terrific actress. First, she doesn’t have a car and depends on public transportation to get everywhere. Second, she is a friend to bus drivers.
“I figure it’s a pretty [bleepy] job,” she said. “The drivers deal with people all day, and they can’t all be nice people, so I try to be nice.”
A couple of years ago, Cristin hopped on her Damen bus and said hello to the driver, just as she always did. This time, instead of just saying hello back, he stopped her.
“He said ‘Hey, hang on. I have something for you,’ ” she said. “He gave me a card and said, ‘You always have a smile for me when you get on.’ “
The driver was leaving the route and wanted Cristin to know her smiles had not gone unnoticed. That says as much about the bus driver as it does about Cristin, whose tale we return to now.
It’s cold and icy. Cristin is standing alone at a valid bus stop on Western Avenue near Lawrence when a bus pulls up. She sees a man exit the back while she waits at the front, but the door doesn’t open.
“I’m standing right where the door is, and the driver is shaking his head vigorously and saying, ‘It’s an express, it’s an express,’ ” she said. Then it pulled away.
She asked the man who just got off how he got the bus driver to stop if it was an express. Here’s what the driver told the man: “Well, I’ll let you off since you’re going to a bar.”
“I was so angry, I couldn’t believe it,” said Cristin, who also happened to be on her way to a bar. “I don’t understand why he couldn’t let me on if he was letting somebody off. I understand he’s not supposed to let people on, but if he’s letting somebody off, why can’t he let somebody on? It’s not like there was a crowd of people. And the bus was empty.”
Undeterred, Cristin started running to the non-express stop a couple of blocks away. “I almost get there, and I think he sees me in the mirror, and then he pulls away,” she said.
Oh-for-two.
“I always say hello to my bus driver,” Cristin said. “If that bus driver had let me on I would have said, ‘Thank you so much.’ “
Besides $1.75, that’s all most of us have to offer. Sometimes, neither is enough.
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jgreenfield@tribune.com
