The older I get, the better I was.
This is something I first offered almost fifteen years ago. Odd how many things have changed but still stay the same. At the time, I called it:
At the Sound of the Last Bell
Being a grown-up has its moments. I can stay up as late as I want; wear blue socks with brown trousers, and put as much chocolate in my milk at breakfast as I wish. Or I can choose to do NONE of those things, but in any event, it's on me and me alone.
Sometimes, the trade-off for not needing a grown-up's permission to cross the street or a taller person to get the good Monopoly game off the top shelf in the bedroom closet proves to be a loss of wonder and an absence of joy at the humdrum.
Driving home the other day, I took Route 32 through Montville instead of staying on my side of the river to the Pequot Bridge and taking Interstate 395. Route 32 is a main thoroughfare in Montville, which has houses all over the place. With school back in session, the wheels of the bus(es) go round and round a lot and come to a stop often.
I've ridden buses my whole life including back in Mrs. Hilge's Third Grade at St Peter's in New Brunswick to the corner of Easton and Bloomfield in Franklin Township. I watched our two children get on buses, in our daughter's case far younger, and go farther away, and come home.
It's different when you're in the car behind the bus that rolls to a stop every twenty-two inches (it seems) as the yellow lights flash and then on come the red ones as the doors open and the smallest people you have ever seen get off at the end of another adventurous day in education.
Yeah, traffic is slow, but so what. There's a lot more life lived at five miles an hour than at sixty-five. Having already been both, you'll have to take my word for it. Do you want to go fast? Use the highway.
Some of the youngsters I saw were so tiny, that they came down the bus stairs one step at a time-left foot down, joined by the right foot on the same step, and then over and over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Just past the Mickey D's, beyond the intersection where the Tri-Town supermarket used to be, the bus halted again and eventually, a tiny tot stepped off with a grin that adults have a name for we're not supposed to say in front of kids. He took, perhaps, three steps, and a butterfly from one of the honeysuckle (maybe. What do I look like, a botanist?) vines near the fence landed on his backpack.
He'd taken it off his shoulders as quickly as he'd stepped off the bus because, I think, it weighed more than he did. I'm not sure he was even exhaling as he watched the butterfly walk across the Iron Man decal. He studied that butterfly as intensely and intently as one life form can study another in fifteen seconds. And when the insect decided it, too, had learned all it could and took off, the child's already wide grin became even wider and his eyes danced.
He followed the insect's flight path for a moment then saw a discarded water bottle, snatched that up, and grabbed his backpack, all in one motion, waved to his mom who'd started down the steps of the house, and disappeared inside through the door she held open for him. Not a bad day on the way to growing up, at least that's what it looked like to me.
-bill kenny
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