Got Your Number

I'm glad to hear that the buses and trains are rolling again in Denver. Their Regional Transportation District suffered a week-long strike that ended with concessions being made on wages as well as health care. That's good news, but I can't help but feel just a little responsible.
When I was a sophomore, I rode my bike or walked the two miles to Boulder High School on the days that I couldn't finagle a ride from my parents (a fairly rare occurrence). On the way home one day, I spotted a brown square of plastic with the number four painted on it. I recognized it immediately as the number from an RTD bus, route four. This was back in the olden days before the advent of fancy computerized LED readouts in the front and back of every bus. I considered my options for a moment or two, then popped that ten-inch square into my backpack between my spiral notebook and my algebra book. When I got home, I mounted my trophy on the wall of my room. It was quite the conversation piece for weeks after, "Hey, what's that?"
"It's a bus number."
"Really? Where'd you get it?"
"Found it."
"Really? You stole it, right?"
I am proud to say that I stole none of the bus numbers that eventually adorned the walls of my bedroom. Most of them (the two, the five and the six) came to me the same way the first one did, as a souvenir of my walk home as I crossed a number of different bus routes. The three and the seven remained elusive for some months, and on separate occasions I was awarded first with a number three, and then the seven. The seven was especially hard-won, since it was not only a route that went east of town and was made of tin - not the traditional plastic.
At last the collection was complete, but the numbers kept coming. Friends kept bringing them to me. "Did you need a six still?" "I thought the five you had was pretty scratched up." Others started to create and manage their own bus number collections. I heard stories of how souls more daring than myself would wait at the transfer station and wait for a bus to start to pull away from the curb - and that's when they would slide the number out of the aluminum rail frame on the back. It added an element of danger and criminality with which I wasn't comfortable.
One day I dragged home a Stop sign. Then a "Fishing For Fun Area" sign with the rules and regulations which I hung directly above the toilet in my bathroom. For three years my room filled with various bits of civic property. My brothers dabbled in this realm of interior decorating as well. When I finally went off to college, my parents were stuck with three sons worth of road signs, pylons, flashing barricades, and bus numbers. In the dead of night after all three of us had moved out of the house, my father loaded all our ill-gotten booty into the station wagon and unloaded it stealthily on the steps of the Municipal Building. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Some twenty-five years after the fact, I have no way of knowing what my friends' parents did with all the bus numbers that found their way into their homes. It is because of this that I still feel, at least vaguely, responsible for the fiscal challenges faced by the Denver metro area's Regional Transportation District. Again, on behalf of myself and my cohorts, my most sincere apologies.