BROKEN BUS!

Special K and I were driving into work today - if we go through DC, my office is on the way to his, which means that my commute is 30 minutes, and his is about an hour. Compared to 45 minutes alone, sitting in traffic on the Beltway. So he views this as an improvement, and I have no complaints. As we rounded Florida Ave., just west of 14^th Street, we saw a Metro bus stopped in oncoming lane with a repairman busily working away under the hood. We drove by and K commented “I guess that bus is broken down”, to which I replied “BROKEN BUS!!”

He looked at me quizzically and started to laugh, as I grinned and said “haven’t you heard that story before?”

He hadn’t.

When we lived in Pakistan when I was a kid, we would take road trips to the beach and other such places, and in order to pass the time (this was way before the days of DVD players in cars. This was actually before the advent of the VCR) we would play “I Spy”. Now, as a child I was definitely the exuberant, outgoing kid, who would stack blocks up and knock them down just to watch them fall, and laugh hysterically. My brother was the type of kid who was reading Newsweek at the age of four and would make cities out of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. So he took the rules of I Spy a little more seriously than I did – mostly because I think he understood them. We were driving down the road one day (GOING DOWN THE ROAD!) and in the middle of I Spy, I saw a Pakistani bus by the side of the road, having some mechanical difficulty. We noted the bus as we went on our way. When it was my turn, I said that I spied something beginning with the letter "B". After much unsuccessful guessing, I simply exclaimed “BROKEN BUS!” and laughed. And then, for the rest of my formative years, whenever playing I Spy, my guess was always BROKEN BUS. My brother could have said he spied something beginning with the letter “Q”, and my response would still be BROKEN BUS. This was the cause of a little exasperation on his part, and great amusement for my parents. Which is really the main reason people have kids, isn’t it?

So yeah. While I do actually know how to play I Spy these days…my favorite answer is still BROKEN BUS!

(What’s hilarious is that I called each of my parents to tell them about this, and I hadn’t gotten past the part about the city bus being broken down before each of them said “BROKEN BUS!”)