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It's 2011 and anything can happen this year
By Dorothy Cummings McLean
January 5, 2011
Dorothy Cummings McLean
An odd thing happened shortly after I wrote my article on Mozart’s Requiem Mass. But to understand it, you have to understand something about Edinburgh.
Edinburgh’s slums were destroyed after the Second World War, and the Edinburgh poor were transported to housing projects or “estates” on the outskirts of the city. To get to my home just beyond the city limits, I take a bus through one of the city’s most depressed neighbourhoods.
Edinburgh’s slums were destroyed after the Second World War, and the Edinburgh poor were transported to housing projects or “estates” on the outskirts of the city. To get to my home just beyond the city limits, I take a bus through one of the city’s most depressed neighbourhoods.
This bus is usually crowded and provides a slice of Scottish life that somehow gets left out of the tour guides and TV shows. The elderly drunks; the teenage mothers; the pale, red-eyed youth crouched in a back corner, his backwards posture not quite hiding that he is smoking marijuana; the cursing, coughing woman yelling that she needs to go to the hospital; the lone African ignoring comments that he could be a drug dealer: you don’t see them on “Monarch of the Glen” or onstage at Brigadoon.
But that is who I share my bus with, and in my house that vehicle is referred to as “the Rough Bus.”
Occasionally I think I should stop taking the Rough Bus. I wonder if I should take driving lessons this year. I wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to take the bus through a nicer neighbourhood and walk the extra mile. But then I think of the fascinating conversations and the astonishing turns of phrase that I collect in my notebook, and I decide that my life would be the poorer without the Rough Bus.
Shortly after I filed my column about Mozart’s Requiem Mass, I took the Rough Bus home from a quiet dinner with friends. It was about half past nine and pitch-black outside. I was looking idly out the window when I heard a terrific smash. A rock had sailed through the air through the window four rows ahead of me. The bus came shuddering to a stop outside a housing estate.
“A woman was sitting there but she had just gotten up to get off, thank God,” said the driver to the inspector when she finally turned up.
He pronounced “off,” “oaf.” Still living, I marked this down in my notebook.
The passengers bound for that stop had long since gone. The rest of us stayed where we were, waiting for the next Rough Bus, quietly texting or calling whomever was at the end of our journey. A youth in athletic gear and a mobile phone walked past and jeered at the driver. A bus coming in the other direction slowed down. Its driver rolled down his window and called out a greeting to our driver.
“Watch your windy!” warned our driver.
Not window, windy. I wrote that down.
“I could have been killed,” said the old man in front of me. His voice was reedy and querulous. He was taking this personally.
“Any one of us could have been killed,” said the driver. “That rock came in at 30 miles an hour.”
The rock, a greyish chunk smaller than my fist, sat on the floor amid the broken safety glass. The driver watched the splintered window and warned that it might fall inward or outward but it would certainly fall.
But we still stayed where we were because it was cold and, frankly, who wants to be out in that neighbourhood after dark?
Eventually the next bus came. But before it did, I marvelled at the difference a few seconds makes. If the woman sitting in front of the smashed window had not gotten up when she did, she might have been killed. If the rock had been thrown a split second later, it might have hit me. I might have been killed, and the last article of mine you would ever have read would have been about Mozart’s Requiem Mass.
How spooky is that?
I was asked to write about “looking forward to 2011,” but I won’t feel comfortable writing about 2011 until I am actually in it. Anything can happen in 2011. Teetering between the old year and the new, I am afraid to make any pronouncements. Even as I firmly believe in the love of God, I am haunted by the uncertainty of earthly existence.
When at last I got to my bus stop, I saw a police car in the gates before our drive. As I passed it, grateful to see my husband with a flashlight, the driver drove after me and rolled down his window. Thieves had knocked over a nearby business. Och, aye. Could they have come this way? Was there a path? Aye? And whaur did it go tae?
Where, indeed?
Dorothy Cummings McLean