I can understand missing the bus on a normal morning, but on a morning with a two-hour delay?
For the last year or so, I have selfishly reserved the mornings for sitting at my desk and scribbling on endless yellow pad pages that I then carefully file away into manila folders and never look at again. To facilitate this vital writerly activity, I leave it to Amy to get the kids onto the school bus. Then, I take care of the afternoon pickups.
When Amy is running the morning departure, it seems to go like clockwork. I suppose it is a combination of familiarity and experience on her part and the ever-more-successful efforts of the local school to break the children’s spirits and mold them into good factory workers, including a willingness to live according to the dictates of the clock and lunch bell. At any rate, there is hardly ever any screaming—at least none that penetrates my Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty Earplugs.
Sometimes the morning kid/bus routine falls to me, however—such as when Amy has to leave early for an inspection site on the other side of the state, for example, or when there is a weather-related delayed opening. Considering that this latter circumstance arises approximately every other day January-March, you’d think I’d develop something of a routine myself, but it inevitably unfolds as a bit of a shit show.
Basically I just continue hiding in my office as long as possible, letting them vegetate in front of the TV, thinking it will be the work of just a few minutes to get them bundled out and shove them out the door, but of course it always takes longer than expected to snap them out of their YouTube trances and get them started on finding, donning, and tying shoes, figuring out what weight of jacket is needed, brushing their teeth, running combs across their heads (this last is preceded by a ten-minute argument on good days, so it often falls by the wayside, and I’m always waiting for a knock on the door from CPS in response to a report that the children have been sent to school with matted hair), find and stuff errant papers into backpacks, and so forth.
So it often happens that, in the midst of all of this, I’ll catch sight of the clock and decide that, this time, I really have waited too long and we will be lucky to make the bus, if in fact we aren’t already missing it at that very second.
“Go, run to the corner,” I’ll snap at Axl, figuring if he can just round the neighbor’s big hedge in time the bus driver will see him and wait, giving me time to finish tying Belle’s shoes, scoop her up, and bring up the rear at a run. In fact, it has only ever happened once or twice that we haven’t reached the bus stop before the bus, and even then we had plenty of time as the dozen or so kids who leave from our stop made their shambling way up the three steps and back to their various assigned seats, but that doesn’t prevent me from experiencing these panics nonetheless.
Then came this particular morning: a two-hour delayed opening, not because of weather this time, but rather to allow time for a “faculty senate” meeting (mental picture of the children’s teachers in long black occult robes with multicolored sashes in amphitheater seating, regarding the superintendent in his toga and crown of laurels).
We had already reached the point of my panic, Axl had been sent out the door, Belle was on the threshold, one foot raised to start down the steps—when, no, the jacket she was wearing wouldn’t do. She must have the leopard-print fleece thing she recently received as a birthday present. Exasperated but also a soft touch, I hesitated, then dashed upstairs to where I thought I’d noticed it hanging in Belle’s room, but no luck. I tore through the rest of the house, scanning chair backs and other likely dumping spots. Still no luck. I quailed—would Belle accept this, would I be in for slinging her over my shoulder, screaming, and racing her to the bus stop?
“I don’t know where it is, and if you don’t leave now you will miss the bus,” I said to Belle when I returned to the mud room. Something in my tone seemed to reach through the usual stubbornness, and she assented and turned to go. I leaned out of the backdoor and called after her.
“You’d better just run,” I called, half suspecting I was exaggerating.
“O-tay,” she said, solemnly, and broke into a plodding trot, weighed down by her winter coat and boots and a backpack larger than her torso.
“But still look both ways!” I called as she reached the side walk.
“O-tay!” she called back.
I watched until she rounded the hedgerow corner, then went back inside, looked at the clock. Later than ever before—she couldn’t have made it. I rushed back outside and hurried to the hedgerow corner. There was the bus, and Belle—still running—rounding the front, the white blob of the driver’s head behind the tinted window inclined down toward her.
Later, I would learn that she had, to all intents and purposes, missed the bus. That around the time I’d been shooing her out the door, the last of the line of children already waiting at the stop had filed aboard. The driver had looked in his large mirror to be sure everyone was seated and was preparing to set out for the next stop—ready to retract the stop sign that flips out from the side of the bus and put the vehicle in gear—when Axl rose from his seat and rushed forward.
“My sister isn’t here yet,” everyone agreed later that he had said. Then, spying her rounding the hedge, he had pointed. “There she is!”
Later, I would be unsure which part of the morning’s hectic dance had turned out to be more beautiful. Axl’s expression of custodial big-brotherly care—the least one can hope for, that, for all their differences and conflicts, your children will simply look out for each other—you don’t let the bus leave without your sister.
Or Belle, dwindling in the distance, that enormous backpack bouncing up and down, running because I said she needed to and she believed me. Trying her best to catch the bus.
The moments this life runs on. The moments when it seems possible to believe maybe we are getting some things right.