Go Greyhound

TO: the nine friends of Dan McGleno, 
none of whom I have ever met, 
who chipped in to buy me plane fare 
over the Christmas holiday

Dear friends that I don’t know,

This is Mike, the man who took the bus to Ohio in December. Our friend Dan heard I was using the bus and decided that was no good, so he passed the hat, to raise money for me so I would not have to ride the bus back.

You can't know how touched I was by Dan's concern, much less by the effort of going to friends and relatives to talk up my case. None of you had any idea who I was, but when Dan asked, you got out your checkbooks. That's Dan, all right. I guess it’s you, too.

Anyway, I owe you something in return, so I'm writing this letter of thanks and explanation.

My name is Mike Finley. I live in Saint Paul with my wife Rachel and my kids Daniele and Jon. Dan's wife Sue is a patient of Rachel's at a community clinic on West 7th Street, and somehow or other Dan and I became friends. Technically I'm not supposed to be friends with my wife's patients' husbands.

But Dan and I hit it off. We are both baseball coaches, and we found we shared a kind of idealism, if that is not an egotistical thing to say. We have had some great talks, at O'Gara's and other places.

When I had my 50th birthday, Dan left a big computer monitor box on my front porch. Only instead of a computer monitor, the box contained a crazy autobiography of Dennis Rodman.

Dan's idea was that I reminded him of Rodman, a self-created person. Only it was crazier than that, because he described Rodman as the "Mike Finley of the NBA." You know Dan better than me, so I don’t have to explain that.

Also, he gave me a wooden head of Rodman on a steel rod -- get it? -- which he carved from some kind of bed post or something. It was an incredible artifact, which I unfortunately gave my son Jon to take to a show-and-tell at school, and he lost. I love my son, but I wish he hadn’t lost my Dennis Rodman head, because it was really cool.

So 2001 was a pretty crappy year for my family. I am a freelance writer, but the recession hit publishing very hard, and we limped into the holidays pretty broke. Back in Ohio, my mom, whose name is Mary and who has been sick for some years -- heart failure and diabetes -- was being released from the hospital after nearly three months, and I felt I had to pay her a visit and look after her.

I could have paid for an airline ticket. I have a credit card. But it was expensive, and moreover, I wasn't sure when I would be able to return home, so I could not give a date for a return flight, which most "discount tickets" require.

I figured, why not take the bus. They get you there, you don't have to drive, and maybe you'll see some interesting people.

Rachel opposed the bus idea. She worried I would get hepatitis from sitting next to someone with a cough. I promised her I would not inhale until I got to Cleveland.

Not all bus depots, I found, are still in the downtowns of big cities. Saint Paul's is on University Avenue. Chicago's is right by the Dan Ryan Expressway, for easy on and off. Only Cleveland's -- good old, stolid old Cleveland -- is still where it was in the old days, downtown amid the biggest buildings.

I thought the people on the us were nice. And surprisingly upscale, too. Several college students sat near me, reading Wall Street Journals. An older woman behind me got on the wrong bus by mistake, and had to flag the driver down before we got out of Saint Paul.

I sat next to a young black man, maybe 17, who seemed to resent me in a nonspecific way. He did not even want to share the armrest between us. For most of the trip I looked the other way and listened to Steve Earle and a bunch of Napster downloads on my CD player. I didn’t speak a word to that young man for 19 hours. He didn’t seem to want me to me, and I guess I didn’t have anything to say. How about that!

A high point was the last 100 miles, when four other men joined me in a loud conversation about bad drivers. One of them was a trucker, and his stories were especially horrifying -- he had routinely seen the highway smeared with hamburger.

I debussed, apparently without hepatitis, and drove with my brother Brian to my mom's house. We were having a major hullabaloo with our mother, who has a bad heart and has been unable to remember to take her medicines. So she was rollercoasting, getting sick, going into the hospital, coming out, going back in.

It was plain to us that she was no longer able to live by herself, not even in assisted living. We discussed placing her in a local nursing home. But we agreed that, if we did that, we would be as much in the dark about her condition as ever. (We all live out of state.)

So, the idea occurred to me to bring her home with me to Minnesota. I discussed it with Rachel by phone -- I think she may actually have been first to put Mary and Minnesota in the same sentence.

I brought the idea up with Mary and I was surprised at how quickly she agreed with the idea. It is a very big deal, as she has lived in that area for 60 years and has all her friends and social networks there. But she said, "Let's do it."

It was at this point, while I was packing up all of Mary's things, that Rachel called and told me about your donations. It wasn't like the last scene of It's a Wonderful Life, because I was calling long distance when I learned about your kindness, but it felt about the same way to me. In truth, I felt very alone taking on this new responsibility. And then there you all were, cheering me on, whether you knew it or not. At first I felt embarrassed, then glad to know someone like Dan, and in turn, glad to know people like you.

On January 12, I helped my mom out to her car -- a nice new Ford Taurus, a red one -- tossed her apartment keys under the descending garage door, backed out of her driveway for the last time, and sped out to the turnpike.

The trip was the opposite of the Greyhound Trip. Mary was still pretty sick, but she seemed to have a spark of adventure in her, a sense of making the most of a new life. We got home in a little over half the time the bus would have taken. We drove trough Chicago and up and down the Wisconsin hills as the sun was setting behind them.

Oh, we still had hard times ahead of us. Lots of problems about money, and getting my mom up and down our stairway. We wound up installing an elevator chair for her to ride. And she misses her friends back in Ohio.

But every night we sit down at the table to eat, three generations of us. And it feels mostly good.

So thank you for your thoughtful gifts. Just as you intended, I did not take the bus back to Minnesota. I came back in a way I never imagined, and life has changed remarkably. Please wish us continued good luck, as my family wishes the very best for you.