Texas 2009: Commerce Street, Dallas: Greyhound

I rode the Greyhound from Houston to Dallas. (It was pretty easy; it took less out of me than my daily commute does.) I also rode the bus from Galveston to Houston. There I got into a conversation of sorts. It started with an apology. We weren't on the bus. We were waiting at the bus station, which was to say that we were waiting out beside a gas station. One passenger, a father, apologized to another passenger who was sitting on the ground--the father's boy, walking to the gas station door, had stepped over the sitting man. The father explained; it sounded like the boy had Asperger's. The father kept talking to me. If he was taking care of a kid with heavy Asperger's, he may have been starved for two-way conversation. The boy's mother was dead. The father was a Vietnam veteran; in the states, he'd been a truck driver. He was glad he wasn't a soldier anymore, having wearied of the smell of blood and burning flesh. He and the boy had been dividing their time between Galveston and Albuquerque. They didn't always live in the city--they also camped a lot. He loved Galveston, but had been around for Hurricane Ike. His vehicle had been destroyed. Now he'd finally saved up enough money to buy another vehicle. They wouldn't be coming back to Galveston, though he still loved the place--the hurricane had been too scary. Instead, they'd go to Yuma, Arizona. He'd never heard of anything bad happening in Yuma.

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