The bus lady
“I haven’t ridden the bus in three weeks,” says Janis “the bus lady” Scott. Then she adds with a chuckle, “But I’m not giving up my title.”
For those who know her, Scott has a seemingly impossible ability to be everywhere — Rice University lectures, METRO board meetings, gallery talks at the MFAH —while exclusively using the bus. Even though her walking speed has slowed, she has kept up the routine. Or she had been — until COVID-19.
“If she had to stay home, she’d go nuts,” her friend Carolyn Watters said in a 2012 Houston Chronicle profile of Scott.
Now she’s finding out whether that’s true.
“The last time I rode was to Kroger to stock up on supplies,” she says.
The husband of one of Scott’s friends comes by once a week to drop off groceries and she’s feeling fine. A native Houstonian who grew up the child of a domestic worker near the Ship Channel where she still lives, Scott was among the first African Americans to graduate from Rice. The Association of Rice University Black Alumni honored her for her community service. Now she takes an online course through the School of Continuing Education that features a different professor every week.
“I don’t have a computer so I watch all the lectures on my phone,” she says. Her phone also connects her to the HoustonGalveston Area Council and METRO public meetings she once attended in person.
“I understand they need to hold some meetings, that they don’t want to fall behind, but they should delay decisions on major plans,” she said, noting that technical difficulties kept many participants from being able to ask questions and comment.
While she is happy to see the city, county and nonprofits open up drive-thru testings and food banks, she is exasperated by the lack of discussion of those without access to cars.
When she’s not taking in a lecture, she watches episodes of The Andy Griffith Show on her phone or just sits out on her porch catching up on reading.
The cats in her East End neighborhood are coming by to visit.
“Usually they walk me home every night from the No. 30 stop,” she says. “Now they are showing up at my porch and they must have heard something because they stay 6 feet apart.”