BRANDON WISCONSIN RR-2 53919
It is that time of year again when dedicated steam brothers are
tuning up their engines for reunions all across the country, and
their wives are wondering whether their men are black or white as
they emerge from those cumbersome machines. I have, now and again,
washed some decidedly sooty clothes myself
Many of our ladies are as busily cleaning house as the women we
regularly see on the heading of the Ladies’ Page. Certainly we
often go our separate ways in interests, but there is a crucial
need that we never break communication between ourselves and those
nearest and dearest to us. I learned in February of this year what
misery a barrier in communication can cause. ‘ On the last
evening of January I boarded a Greyhound Bus for Kansas City,
Kansas. Our eldest ‘daughter and her family live near DeSoto,
Kansas. We telephoned to let her know I was coming. She was excited
and overjoyed. ‘Now remember,’ my worried husband informed
her, ‘she is coming to the Kansas City, Kansas Bus
Station.’ ‘Ginni murmured her assent on the other end of
the line.
Cross-country bus travel was a new experience for me. I
carefully carried my money in a small shoulder bag underneath my
coat, also my round-trip ticket, whilst struggling with a suitcase
and a tote bag. I wasn’t about to give anybody my luggage. I
wanted my clothes there with me. I have heard too many stories of
lost luggage.
I safely made it through Chicago and onto the St. Louis bus. In
the early morning hours as I waited in St. Louis a fine looking
young man sat down beside me. I soon learned he was a ministerial
student from the Nazarene Seminary in K.C. He immediately took me
under his wing. He couldn’t have been nicer to his own mother.
He checked my bags with his while we waited for our next bus. We
roamed the station, talking of many things. It was just like a
having a son along. He helped me on the next bus and we travelled
on toward Kansas City, Missouri. Here he left me and I continued on
to K.C, Kansas.
There was no one waiting to meet me when I got there. Right then
Ginni was having me paged in the K.C, Missouri bus station. Soon
the telephone rang. ‘Do we have a Mrs. Alfred Baber here?’
a voice rang out from the desk. ‘Yes! Yes!’ I almost
shouted. ‘I’m here.’
‘You are wanted on the telephone,’ he informed me and I
hurried to answer my call. Little did I know, at that moment, that
Ginni had already called home and demanded, ‘Where is
Mother?’
‘What, isn’t she there?’ my husband countered.
‘Maybe she got on the wrong bus. How should I know where she
is?’ Then, in order to pacify her he asked, ‘Well-where are
you?’ So between them they ironed the thing out. I wondered why
she hadn’t listened in the first place. She is inclined to be
scatter-brained.
I will say there was no lack of communication once we got
together. We talked by the hour. But I was tired. I had been on my
way for seventeen hours.
My lesson on communication had only begun. The trip home brought
all its ramifications before me a bit too strongly for comfort.
This time, in St. Louis, an elderly couple boarded the Chicago
bound bus. I couldn’t pinpoint their nationality by looking at
them. The gentleman looked like a Bohemian artist with his long
scarf wrapped around his neck, and his bare gray head above it. I
was quite intrigued. His wife clucked along beside him.
Being alone I tried to stay near the front of the bus. I had the
second seat behind the driver. We set off on what was to be a
through trip to Chicago. No stops. Sometime around two or three
A.M. the bus driver pulled up for a ten minute coffee break at an
all-night restaurant. About half the people followed him into the
place, including our mystery couple, and all their luggage. I
thought, ‘Oh! Oh! Now what?’ I decided to stay put.
The couple returned most reluctantly and sat down somewhere
behind me admidst a torrent of speech in a foreign language. I
think it was Spanish, as frequently she would say, ‘Si.
Si.’ Unfortunately no one on that bus was any more enlightened
than I.
As we took to the road there was sullen silence, then another
outburst of speech. And then our perplexed traveller came shakily
striding toward the front of the bus and began upbraiding the
driver in his language. The drive told him to ‘go sit
down,’ that he was shutting off his view of traffic. One big
black man across the aisle from my seat sought to correct the
situation by shouting, ‘No savvy! No savvy!’ which, of
course, our traveller couldn’t savvy, no how.
About that time his wife joined the verbal fray, and the
confused man started pounding on the windows. He wanted out! Angry
fists were displayed right under the driver’s nose. We were
moving at 50-55 miles per hour as all this continued. Everyone was
on the edge of their seat.
It was truly remarkable how that bus driver ‘kept his
cool’ as they say. This went on for close to an hour, it
seemed.
Finally his wife convinced him to come back and sit down. In
relief I dozed off for a bit only to awaken to a new outburst, with
both of them up front again. What a night!
Finally we reached Chicago, and there they found someone who
could communicate with them. They took off for Michigan and I
headed for Milwaukee. But the lesson has stayed with me. How much
we need communication, and what an awful condition we can get into
without it.
We need it on earth. We need it with our Heavenly Father. We
need it to attain heaven. Apparently our couple felt they were to
have stayed at our first stop. Their journey was not complete, but
they couldn’t understand what people were trying to tell them.
How like the earthling who feels no need of learning what God has
in store ‘for those who love Him.’ Nor do they consider
judgment if they turn Him away. Let us be extra sure we know where
we are going in our complicated world, and that our communication
is clear and upward bound.
