I'm not sure what time it was but I did not weird twilight zone area of sleep in on sleep in the middle of the night when I heard the distant chirping of the UTA bus lowering the front end or possibly even deploying the access ramp. This really struck me kind a weird because even Redwood Road which runs right past my apartment complex stop service around 10:45 PM on regular nights. I was just intrigued and interested why there is such a vehicle out on the service during the wee hours of the morning. And in all truthfulness is not like I didn't get up and check. I guess it could have been a truck backing up or something they have a chirping sound.
Before tumbled back to sleep my mind it be “way back” trip to the early 80s just after I'd start work for an Independent Living Ctr., Blackfoot, ID. This was long before I was the transit coordinator in Salt Lake. Anyway, the director of that sheltered workcenter which it hired me sound grant money to send me up to Seattle to attend a conference on world transportation and believe me Blackfoot truly counted as rural. Truthfully, my trip to Seattle was whether my first real “company trips”. I was all by myself in the big city of Seattle. I had a room on about the 6th floor of what I considered a posh hotel. We are right in downtown Seattle, there was significant downtown lights which never dimmed. Whatever the reason I was awake around 2 o'clock or 3 AM and just couldn't sleep. I got up and rolled over to the window looked down on the street. I was shocked and intrigued to see the only traffic of any consequence were large transit buses. Side note, all these buses were accessible I'd never seen anything like it. All night long these buses ran. 5 years later when I had moved to Salt Lake I realized how significant Seattle's transit was. Salt Lake did not have any accessible bus routes operating at the time, most routes shut down early in the evening and it seemed like management was antagonistic towards ever providing accessibility to consumers with disabilities.
The trip down memory lane didn't last very long after all I need to get back to sleep its coffee social day and I have to be awake , dressed in functional by 9:30 AM. I didn't have time to think about why accessible buses were wandering around Salt Lake at 3 AM. Even more concerning/intriguing was who was riding them and where were they going. I'm sure I've got it all wrong and half of what I thought was real which is happening early this morning was just my dreaming of what could be and what Seattle did 40+ years ago.
Gloria on the 2nd floor passed away last week and your funeral is tomorrow. Actually I don't think she's getting a real funeral just a viewing and the graveside ceremony of some sort. As a rule I don't go to these kind of things but I'm thinking on going tomorrow just because her daughter has been living here with Gloria and I think Cindy needs a lot of support to get through this whole ordeal. Not only did she lose her mother this week and they were pretty close she's also losing her housing and who knows what else. She's not employed, has no savings and no transportation is in a worse place a person can be at this point in the American economy. I hope she makes it…
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