Amish Take the Bus

           

            On Friday morning, after song practice, I set about to put some of the files, that I’d wisely backed up a few weeks before, back onto my system. I started out with a document in which I combine the lyrics to my songs with the guitar chords. I transferred the file and opened it up, because I’ve been working on learning to play my song, “Paranoiac Utopia”, but the song wasn’t in the file. It turned out that the file looked like it did about two years ago when I last backed it up. I opened my French Lyrics folder and my translation of Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” was nowhere to be found, after all the work I’d done on it. The same was true of the last two years of Serge Gainbourg’s songs, except that in the case of those, they could all be copied from my “Christian’s Translations” blog where I posted them as soon as I worked out the chords and then learned to play them. It seemed that of all the backup disks I’d made, that was the only one that, for some unknown reason, didn’t take. I was fortunate that I had put my daily journal on a flashdrive the day before. Now that I knew that all these song files were missing, I was especially anticipating the next time I had money so I could get the device I’d been told about that can turn old hard drives into data storage drives.

            Eleanor and Anna came to my yoga class on Friday. It’s the first time I’ve had two students in several months. I called Anna by her Indian name of Annapurna, but she corrected me. She said I pronounce it well but people tend to muck it up so she’d rather just be called “Anna” here in Canada.

            We were discussing vegetarianism and she said that her family was Brahmin and so there was more pressure for them to stay strictly lacto-vegetarian than there is for the other castes of India.

            After yoga I headed downtown to the bus terminal to meet my daughter, who would be arriving from Montreal at 16:30 on her way to Buffalo, but she would have a one-hour wait time between buses so I came to keep her company. I didn’t see Astrid anywhere when I got there. I walked all around the station and even to the other terminal across Elizabeth Street but I couldn’t find her. I went to a ticket window and was told that the bus would have arrived at 16:15, which would have meant that I was late. I wondered if she’d gone somewhere outside the station after not having seen me. Finally though, she walked in after her bus had arrived about ten minutes late. We had about half an hour to sit together and then I went to stand in line with her. A little ahead of us was a small group of Amish, one man and three women, all middle-aged and all in black from head to toe. The women wore black bonnets and the man a cool black wide brimmed hat. I think this is formal and maybe travelling attire for the Amish. When they conversed they were speaking in what I think was Dutch. All the women were the same height but slightly taller than the man. Astrid commented that her trip was going to be a holy one. I suggested that they would probably be getting off at St Catherines because I thought that there was an Amish community there. I might have been thinking of the Mennonites though because when I looked it up I saw that there is a big Amish community near Buffalo.

            Astrid was going to stay with a friend in upstate New York and she normally takes a bus directly there from Montreal but this route by way of Toronto and Buffalo was about a hundred dollars cheaper. Her friend was supposed to pick her up in Buffalo but she hadn’t gotten a formal confirmation in response to her text about her arrival, so she was a little worried about being stranded in the cold in Buffalo. I saw her onto the bus and headed home.