Story and photography by Leanne Stahulak
Saturday, February 22, 2:17 a.m.
Slumped on the black leather seat, residues of rum and vodka still sloshing through my veins, the moment feels like the beginning of a bad joke as three people step onto the bus: the wasted wanderer, the guilty stowaway, and the sleepy drunk.
It’s 2:17 a.m., and this is the last time the shuttle will be carting people from the bars back to Annex Apartments. Annex is a good mile from the southeastern corner of campus, and more than two and a half miles from Uptown. For those wanting to avoid Uber fees, couch crashing, or stumbling back in the dark and cold, the shuttle is the only option.
In the sordid start of this terrible joke, I’m the sleepy drunk. My temple connects with the icy window pane as soon as I collapse into the seat, my breaths deepening as my spinning head settles against the glass. Across the aisle, the guilty stowaway bounces his leg incessantly, nervousness pouring off him.
Just as my eyelids slip shut, a raucous knock sounds on the glass door.
I wince as the overhead lights flip on, illuminating a guy in a light green t-shirt and gray jacket swaying from side to side outside the bus door. The wasted wanderer.
He smiles sloppily at Brenda Kinder, our sweet-natured bus driver. The wasted wanderer takes a step forward, one foot slipping as he tries to prop it up on the first step. “Do you know where High Street is?” he slurs.
Brenda, to her credit, doesn’t lash back with a pithy comment stating that we are, in fact, currently parked on High Street. She just hides a smile, the soft Christmas lights dangling from Uptown Park’s trees casting a faint glow on her face. “Yes, I do know where High Street is,” she says.
The wanderer grins, gesturing wildly up the road towards Chipotle and UDF. “I live on High Street! But I don't think I can run home. It’s, like, past that stoplight, and then the next one, and then I live two blocks down. But I don't think I can run there.”
Brenda glances at the glowing orange clock on her dashboard. “Well, I have to wait here until 2:30. I gotta make sure I pick up everyone who needs picking up because this is my last run. Can you wait that long?”
The wanderer sucks in a breath, his head wavering back and forth between the distant street ahead and Brenda. “Do you think I can run there in that time?”
The guilty stowaway suddenly pipes up. “Definitely not.”
Brenda looks the guy over. “I don't know. But if you need me to, I can take you down the road. I’m going up that way anyway.”
The wanderer claps his hands into a prayer pose and bows his head towards Brenda. “You are the best. Literally the best.”
As the dude hops up the remaining steps and swings into a seat two rows behind me, I study the back of Brenda’s head. Since last semester, Annex started requiring all residents to carry a red and white bracelet that says “Shuttle Pass 19-20.” I’d seen morning bus drivers turn away residents who didn’t have their pass with them, reminding them that if they wanted to get on the bus, they had to prove they lived at Annex. But here was Brenda, content and smiling at almost 2:30 in the morning as a random kid wandered onto her bus.
The guilty stowaway sticks out a hand to the dude, introducing himself as Pete. The wasted wanderer is Garrison. Pete looks at me expectantly, so I shake his hand and tell him my name. Then I turned towards the front and say, “And this is Brenda. She’s the best bus driver out there.”
“Dude, I know!” Pete says. “I literally ride with her, like, all the time. Even though I live at Level and not Annex!”
I scrutinize Pete. Level 27 people sneaking onto Annex buses was the reason for the passes in the first place. I stage-whisper, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud.”
Pete nods. “I know. But I can’t help it. And Brenda’s super chill about it, right Brenda?”
“That’s right, Pete.”
This is definitely not Pete’s first confession.
Brenda pulls away from the curb at 2:30, and Garrison hops up a few rows to sit near her. We go through two stoplights and pass house after darkened house.
“Okay… okay… I see it! Fat-ass yellow house. Two houses down. But you can drop me right here. I’ll run home from here.”
“Are you sure? I can take you closer.”
Garrison shakes his head. “Nah, nah I got it. But you rock, Brenda. You are the best, thank you so so much.”
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” Brenda says with a smile.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Garrison says, saluting Brenda as he stumbles down the steps and onto the grass. He takes off running.
“You really are,” I say. Brenda meets my eyes in her rearview mirror.
“Everyone needs a little help sometimes,” she says. “ I just want them to get home safe.”
As we leave Garrison and his fat-ass yellow house behind us, I mull over Brenda’s words. And as my head slowly sinks back towards the cool window, the same question swims lazily around my brain: How many other times has Brenda helped somebody out?
Friday, February 28, 11:00 p.m.
A week later, my head still spinning with more questions and few answers, I ask Brenda if I can tag along with her for a night on her Uptown route. She agrees, and at 11 p.m. on a Friday night, I settle myself into the seat right behind her as she pulls away from Annex’s curb.
Ten girls fill the rows of bus seats, chatter and laughter echoing throughout the space. All ten are speech pathology grad students, led by a duo of roommates, Sarah-Jane Sambor and Katie Colton. The girls present Brenda with a gift the moment they step onto the bus, eliciting a gasp of delighted surprise from her. Brenda calls this group her “party crew.”
“Round of applause for Brenda!” Sarah-Jane calls. The bus rings with cheers and whoops.
Sarah-Jane leans in close so I can hear her over the din of conversation. “[Brenda’s] so caring, and she’ll do anything for us. She goes above and beyond,” Sarah-Jane says. She tells me how Brenda got a Valentine’s Day cake and Skyline for the group last week, just because the bus driver felt like it.
“She just does so much for us, it's the least we could do,” Sarah-Jane says about her getting a gift for Brenda.
Before getting off the bus Uptown, Sarah-Jane confirms that she’ll text Brenda when they’re getting ready to leave the bars. Sarah-Jane is one of a select group of residents who has Brenda’s number and can text her freely throughout the night whenever they need a ride home.
“Having this shuttle and having that safety is a great thing in and of itself, but having her to drive us home makes me even happier and makes me feel even more safe,” Sarah-Jane says.
As soon as the girls spill out of the bus, Brenda lets out a laugh. “They crack me up, just wait till they get all tanked up!” she says. “Gosh, they're wonderful.”
Before we pull away from the curb, Brenda offers me one of the homemade chocolate chip cookies Sarah-Jane and the others baked for her. She doesn’t take one for herself.
Saturday, February 29, 12:33 a.m.
Not a single soul has stepped onto the bus since we let the party crew off. But in that time, Brenda has filled the space with stories and conversation, sketching a rich and colorful illustration of her life over the last fifty-four years.
Brenda grew up in West Alexandria, Ohio, a small farming community north of Oxford and east of Dayton. At 12 years old, she was driving tractors and large farm trucks. At 16, when she got her driver’s license, the tester told her she should go for her chauffeur's driver license, since she was such a natural behind the wheel. At 18, she was driving high school and elementary school kids all across town.
But the competition for driving buses was fierce, and it only paid part time, so at 22 Brenda quit bus driving to get a full time job. For the next 28 years, she worked for Morning Pride Manufacturing, making and selling protective gear for firefighters. The job allowed Brenda to travel a little bit and try her hand at different tasks (marketing, customer service, sewing). When another company bought out Morning Pride, Brenda turned back to what she knew best.
“I like kids, I like to take care of the kids and make sure they're safe, and [bus driving] was relaxing to me,” Brenda says. “Just talking to the kids and the people that I drive for, and just seeing their lives—I'm just interested in them. It doesn’t feel like it’s a job.”
Even if it doesn’t feel like a job, Brenda still works day in and day out driving buses. From 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., she drives elementary and high school kids to the local schools in her hometown, West Alexandria, before driving for Annex.
“People say I work a lot, but I don’t really feel like I do,” Brenda says, “because I like what I do. If you like what you do, it just doesn’t feel like you're working a lot. I get to talk to the kids and see what's going on in their lives.”
Brenda’s formed bonds with several Annex residents that she drives, but they’re not the only ones that she cares about.
“I just want everybody to be safe. And if I pass somebody up, and I heard a story where they were injured or something, that would just kill me,” Brenda says. “So I don’t pass people up. And if I see that they’ve had a little bit too much to drink, and they ask me if I can take them places that I’m going to be passing by or close to, I'm not gonna turn them away.”
Just like she wouldn’t turn away Garrison, the wasted wanderer.
Brenda drove me past several spots where she’d encountered helpless students. One night, she’d glimpsed a guy carrying a girl up the hill towards the intersection of Oak and Spring Street. She pulled over to offer them a ride, taking them back to the dorms because the girl was too drunk to walk. Her sober friend thanked Brenda over and over again for the ride.
A few weekends ago, in the bitter cold of early February, two girls stood waiting at the bus stop. When Brenda pulled up, they asked if she was with Safe Ride. One of the girls had lost her coat, and tears coated her cheeks as she stood shivering on the snow-dusted pavement. Brenda invited them onto the bus to warm up, promising to wait until the Safe Ride bus showed up to take them back to their dorms. Safe Ride never came.
So Brenda drove the girls back to the dorm herself, and during the ride the girl who’d lost her coat told Brenda how tonight had been the worst night of her life. She cried harder, and Brenda’s heart hurt for the girl.
“I said, ‘It’s gonna get better tomorrow, just don't even think about this night tomorrow morning. Just wake up and just forget about it,’” Brenda says. She goes quiet for a moment. “I felt so sorry for her. I think about her every now and then.”
But the one night Brenda will never forget was a nearly fatal accident she witnessed at the corner of Campus Avenue and Spring Street. As she was turning into the intersection, a car slammed into a stopped car from behind. Brenda was on the phone with 911 almost immediately.
“I heard it more than I saw it. I looked up, and I saw the hit, and the car he hit went flying into the intersection,” Brenda says. “It was just a horrible hit. I knew there was gonna be injuries so I called that in right away.”
Brenda watched as the driver assisted his passenger and checked on the other driver. As sirens sounded in the distance, the passenger collapsed to the ground, eventually being taken away by the ambulance.
After we creep through the junction, Brenda goes, “I hate going down the street at that four way stop now. I just hate to see the accidents.”
Saturday, February 29, 12:53 a.m.
For the 12 hours that Brenda drives the bus on Friday evenings, she risks coming face to face with her constant, monotonous enemy: Boredom.
After her morning route in West Alexandria, Brenda drives Annex’s buses from 2:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, and on Fridays she drives from 2:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Her hours on Saturday are 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. The late hours of the night are always the quietest, and the time when she most needs to keep her mind occupied.
She’s found a few ways to stave off the boredom. Listening to 103.5, a classic rock station, on the radio. Cleaning the bus when she’s stopped at one of the stations and no kids are getting on and off. She even keeps an eye out for suspicious activity, part of her training as a bus driver requiring her to learn about surveillance and certain laws and regulations.
“They tell us that we are the eyes and the ears of police when they’re not in that area,” Brenda says. “So they tell us to keep our phone—for emergency purposes—in our reach, so we can contact police.”
But the biggest counter against boredom for Brenda is interacting with the people who ride the bus. She loves listening to students’ stories about their day, and she has an acute memory for specific instances or situations going on in their lives. Her conversations aren’t just limited to Annex residents, though.
“The people on the street will get messed up and start talking to you,” Brenda says. “Almost every night that I’m working, people are like, ‘Can I just sit on the bus to get warm?’ And they’ve done that and then [me and] our Annex people start talking to them.”
At 12:50 a.m., as we’re headed up Campus Avenue towards Uptown, Brenda cracks a smile and glances back at me. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she says with a laugh. But she wants to take me to one of her favorite spots Uptown where she sits to people watch.
Brenda pulls up to the same bus stop on the edge of Uptown Park that we’ve been parking at all night. But she eases forward with precision, stopping at a specific spot just past the bus stop sign. In her side mirror, it’s easy to see the hordes of people entering and exiting Brick Street, several groups stumbling past us in the cold.
Right before the stoplight on Main Street, though, a large two-inch crack in the sidewalk juts up precariously. Brenda has a clear view of it through the front window of the bus, and when she has nothing better to do Uptown, she’ll sit at the curb and watch people flirt with danger every time they step towards that crack.
“When these kids are really tanked up, they come through here, they trip over here and they stumble. I worry about them falling on their face, though I haven’t seen it,” Brenda says, “but I see them trip a lot, and it just kind of cracks me up. They don’t do it until they're good and drunk.”
Brenda doesn’t watch them because she wants to see them hurt. It just brings a smile to her face, and if anyone really needed help, she’d be there in a heartbeat.
While we’re pulled up to Brenda’s people-watching spot, she gets a text from Matt Burcham, one of her regulars and another member of the party crew. She tells me that he’s going to be at “the Brick” (her nickname for Brick Street Bar and Grill) for another bus cycle, but she’ll be ready if he wants to leave earlier or stay later.
Brenda pulls a pair of reading glasses down from the top of her curly brown head as she texts Matt back. Meanwhile, I watch as a girl in a black leather jacket and black jeans teeters towards the crack on wobbling platform heels. My breath catches in my throat as she raises her foot over it, not bothering to look down. The heel comes down straight on the crack, but it doesn’t slow her down or trip her. The girl keeps going, walking rapidly in the frigid cold. She’s conquered the crack unharmed.
Saturday, February 29, 1:12 a.m.
At 1:12 a.m.,Brenda offers me another one of the homemade cookies gifted to her, still not having one for herself. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve circled from Annex to Shriver to Uptown, the rolling of the bus under me becoming a soothing, comforting lullaby.
But I’m wide awake as we turn on to High Street and spot flashing lights in the distance up near Brick. Brenda crawls forward, cautious of unaware students darting across the street in front of her bus. Pockets of partiers dot the streets, Uptown still fairly populated as people stumble from the bars to Skippers and Skyline for late night drunchies.
Brenda suddenly lets out a gasp, pointing with her pinkie towards the sidewalk on our right.
“Oh, look there!” she says. “That poor girl just fell.”
Sure enough, legs splayed out in front of her and head hanging dejectedly down, a girl sits swaying on the curb, right in front of a parked car. The girl stares forlornly at the curb, like she’s thinking about getting her feet under her but her body refuses to cooperate.
Without a thought, Brenda pulls the bus over as far as she can, craning her neck to see around the parked car. “I hope she’s alright,” she says.
She’s about two seconds from parking the bus entirely and jumping out to help the girl when the door to the parked car bursts open, almost hitting the side of the bus. A guy jumps out and runs over to the girl, gently putting a hand on her elbow and helping her to her feet.
Brenda sighs in relief as she watches him help her. She pulls back into traffic, her eyes darting towards the sidewalk as we crawl down the road.
We pass two girls crying as they speed walk back towards campus. We inch around the ambulance parked by Brick Street, watching a police officer converse with someone just outside the front door. We see students huddling in shivering groups, desperately trying to conserve warmth.
Brenda shakes her head. “They’re just having a rough night,” she says. I wonder if she’s referring to one of them, or all of them.
Saturday, February 29, 1:27 a.m.
Matt Burcham struts onto the bus with Skyline Chili in hand and a bright grin on his face. The junior pre-law and political science major knows Brenda not only from his frequent bus rides with the party crew, but also from working at the Annex office.
“Ms. Brenda, I hate to tell you this, but we’re gonna have to make you throw out your cake soon if you didn’t throw it out already,” Matt says. “We have corporate coming this week, and they’re pretentious as HELL, so we have to be really particular about everything.”
For almost the entirety of the seven minute ride back to Annex, I’ve faded into the background. Matt and Brenda swap stories about their days, Matt apologizing for not riding the bus frequently this week. He tells her about his exams and papers, and she asks him about other members of the party crew who couldn’t make it out tonight.
“I love hearing about Matt’s life,” Brenda says with a smile. Matt quickly cuts in, “You mean my mess of a life.” Brenda tsks and shakes her head in denial.
When I ask Matt if he considers Brenda a friend, he says, “Yes. She’s a Kween. K-W-E-E-N. And you can quote me on that.” She laughs in response.
Brenda doesn’t pull up to Annex’s normal shuttle stop, instead rounding the curve in Southpointe Road to drop Matt directly at his house. He teases her when she momentarily forgets which one it is.
As he hops off the bus, Matt turns back over his shoulder and says, “Thank you Ms. Brenda! We love you, we appreciate you, drive safe always, have a good night!” He kisses his fingertips with an audible “mwah” and raises them to Brenda as he strides for his front door.
“Goodnight!” she calls after him. “He is so sweet, all of these kids are so sweet.”
Brenda already told me that she doesn’t have kids of her own, though she dotes on her nieces and nephews, “practically raising them” with her sister. She thinks of Miami students as kids too, calling them “young” and “innocent.” But in her eyes, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“I feel that they’re my future, they’re gonna be making the decisions in my future, and seeing these kids, I have a lot of faith in [them], and I think they’re gonna do a good job because they’re really sweet, good-hearted kids.”
Saturday, February 29, 1:44 a.m.
Brenda spots them from a mile away.
“These are some Level people that are debating if they should get on,” she says.
Two guys bounce on their toes at the Uptown bus station. The taller one wears only a light red and blue jacket, the other a hoodie. I peer at them closer, trying to see what Brenda sees. Like she can hear my thoughts, she says, “You know the Level people because they won’t make eye contact with you.”
“When it’s cold, it’s dark, I’m going that way anyway, I’m not gonna leave them out in the cold,” she says.
The two guys step onto the bus, heading to the very back and putting as much distance between them and Brenda as possible. When we get closer to Annex, she glances up at them in the rearview mirror.
“Where should I drop you off?” she asks casually. Then she adds, “The clubhouse or the townhouses?”
One guy stammers, “Uh, just the center. The normal route. By the clubhouse?”
I shake my head and try not to sigh. Brenda just turns the bus in towards the clubhouse, and then she starts shaking her head too when the guys get off and make a beeline for Level. They don’t even pretend to go towards one of Annex’s cottages.
“You know, I would’ve taken them closer, if they asked,” Brenda says.
Saturday, February 29, 2:29 a.m.
High Street is a ghost town. I expected to see some stragglers dragging themselves home from the bars, but the deserted sidewalks reveal only beer stains and discarded plastic cups. Brick’s patio, packed to the brim and thriving only half an hour before, stands empty, bright neon lights still flashing from the interior over the bare space.
Brenda still drives slowly up the street, eyes darting from sidewalk to sidewalk. She pauses slightly at the bus station, but pulls away seconds later, having determined that there’s no one left Uptown to drive home. Except me.
We’d already taken Sarah-Jane and her group of friends home around 2:10 a.m. Brenda told me that 2:30 is usually the time people will go get food, and she’ll either wait for them or take them somewhere herself. One way or another, she waits for everyone to get on the bus—tonight just happened to be an early night.
Brenda’s telling me about some of the international students she bonded with last semester—a girl from Turkey and a guy from an Eastern European country—as we turn from Patterson Street onto Southpointe Road. She helped them get around campus at the beginning of last semester and couldn’t believe that the guy had told his parents about her help.
“I don’t feel like I do go out of my way to help others, because I’m going up there anyway,” she’s saying. I stop her in the middle of her story. “Really? You don't think you go out of your way?”
“Really, I don’t, because I feel like I’m going that way anyway,” Brenda says. “And—I don’t know. I really don’t think about it. I guess if I had kids, I would want somebody like that to help my kids out too.”
I sit in stunned silence for a moment as she pulls up to the corner near my townhouse. After spending over three hours with Brenda, hearing her tales and seeing her kindness in action, I struggle with the fact that she doesn’t see her efforts as going above and beyond. That she sees them as expected, conventional—ordinary.
At 2:38 a.m., just before I step off the bus, Brenda offers me one of the homemade chocolate chip cookies for the third time. I accept, and remind her that she better take one for herself too.