The Bus Stop
I once heard on the radio, on my drive home, about this bus stop in Düsseldorf, Germany that goes nowhere. It’s for Alzheimer or Dementia patients who get confused and want to go home. Instead of having them wander off or locking them up, they installed a bus stop where the patients could “wait at” until the nurses could convince them to go back. The best thing about radio is the lack of images – I have this image of a snowy day (because it is always snowing in Germany) and a elderly woman named Anna (because all women in Germany are named Anna) with a short curly white hair, thin eyebrows and dimples that seem to reach past her chin, sitting on an uncomfortable two foot long wooden bench with no back. But in her head she’s 35 and she needs to get home to her husband and two children who did not dress properly for the snow and why isn’t the bus coming. So I’m in the car, and I’m hearing about this half-sad, half-touching story about a bus stop and I think to myself, We all need our own damn bus stop.