On a Bus-Stop

 

As I walked to work, I passed the house where a Hispanic family lives with a big black dog.  The dog is a pit bull mix with a head like a tomahawk and, so, I am always a bit skittish when I approach this place.  At this hour, a few minutes before eight a.m., trains on the edge of town hoot mournfully and yellow school buses prowl the residential streets picking up children. 

The door at the home with the pit bull opened partially.  I expected the dog to emerge.  But, instead, a little boy with back pack strapped to his shoulders came out.  He hurried down the steps to the sidewalk and, then, ran ahead of me.  The child was tiny with short legs but he ran quickly toward the bus-stop at the next intersection.  I expected him to tire after a few hundred feet, but he didn’t slow down.  If anything, he ran even more quickly, darting forward to the corner.  There he paused, looking both right and left as he had been taught, and, upon confirming that the intersection was clear, scurried across the street, the first in his race to the bus stop.  The train circling the town whistled again.  In cold weather, parents bring their kids to this bus stop and, then, wait in idling cars nearby, but it was unseasonably warm and no one else was about.  

I crossed the street to where the child was standing.  He had bright eyes and didn’t seem winded at all.

“You are a very good runner,” I told the little boy.

He answered but I didn’t understand what he said.

“You are fleet of foot,” I said to the boy.

“I run fast at school,” the child said proudly.

I turned and walked two blocks in another direction.  A bus was approaching the intersection ahead of me. It stopped and children boarded and their parents who had been standing at the curb, turned to go home.  One of the fathers lit a cigarette.

A woman hurried toward the bus holding the hand of a little girl in a blue-green snow-suit.  The little girl was whining.  It was a protest of some sort.  The woman gestured at the bus a hundred yards away.  The bus driver wasn’t about to wait for late-comers.  Discipline had to be enforced.  Nearing a rail crossing out in the country, tracks parallel to a battered shelter-belt, the train hooted again.

The bus lurched forward, turning at the corner to drive toward the stop where the fast runner was waiting.  The woman turned around with the child, muttering something under her breath.  The little girl began to wail.

I understood that she had not wanted to get up, not wanted to leave the comfort of her warm bed, and had resisted her mother in every way.  But, now, she saw that she was late to the bus and, probably, would be late to school as well and, although, she didn’t want to go, she didn’t want to not go either and would be ashamed to be tardy.  You don’t want to go and, yet, you don’t want to be left behind.  It is a common dilemma.  Many share it.