We are standing inside the small and somewhat seedy brick and cement bus depot in Gainesville, Florida, waiting for the 3:10 Greyhound to roll in from wherever it’s rolling in from, and Mark Hostetler is telling me how all entomologists are weird. This, coming from a man who uses tweezers to pick dead bugs off the windshields of buses.
Anyway, it seems Hostetler, a 31-year-old Ph.D. candidate in zoology at the University of Florida, used to live with a bunch of zoologists, all of whom kept various oddball research specimens stored in jars in the communal refrigerator.
So when I was dating, says Hostetler, one of the indicators of how long a relationship was going to last was the reaction the woman would have when she opened the refrigerator door.
The 3:10 pulls in with a whoosh of air brakes. Across the room, a guy behind a counter makes a now boarding announcement over the pa and then rattles off a list of indistinguishable sounds that I assume is intended to inform the six or so people waiting inside the depot where the bus is going.
Hostetler peers at the guy. That sounds like Buford, he says. No, it’s not. I thought it might be Buford. I came here twice a week in the summer of ’92. While I was waiting, we used to talk.
