Bus-ted
Written by Brett, Posted in General & Random
With global warming, the start of September no longer means closing up the pool or deep-storing your Daisy Dukes, but where the G.U. lives in New York, it still means the arrival of the first day of school. Yet for many of the Gay Uncle’s friends, this day has already come and gone. He’s received a numerous humorous dispatches from readers about this banner event, but none rivals his friend Danika’s recent experience sending her two daughters–Erica, 8 and Anna, 5–off to the bus stop for their first joint trip to school. Danika was experiencing a host of feelings–wonder, sadness, excitement–as her girls strolled down the driveway to wait. Having grown up in New York City, Danika never rode a school bus, and so all of her ideas about what goes on inside one were formed by watching teen movies, and she felt a bit concerned about the kind of hazing, seating hierarchies, and brown bags full of flaming poo her girls might encounter on the crowded bus. So she was kind of surprised when the enormous yellow vehicle gurgled up, containing not a rolling frat party, but rather…3 silent children. Her daughters were riders 4 and 5, the last on the route. (Talk about carbon footprint!) Panic averted. However, Daika did get a chance to panic at the day’s end, as her daughters failed to arrive home at the appointed time–or even 10, 15, or 30 minutes later. Terrified that they’d been ground up for gelatin, abducted by Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin for her grotesque, far-right, Christian Home-Schooling cult, or forced to star in a remake of Lois Duncan’s schoolbus-kidnapping classic Five Were Missing she dialed the school repeatedly, only to get a busy signal. When she finally got through, she discovered that the girls were not disappeared, but rather, there in the office with their other three route-mates. Apparently, their ultra-responsible bus driver “forgot” that the initial school day ended before lunchtime, and so this tiny cohort had to wait until one of the other buses finished making its deposits so it could come back for them. Gunc tips his hat to this bus driver: way to help those parents through the tangled emotions of the first day.
This was years ago (the kid in question is now a senior in high school), but my sister’s first day of kindergarten ended in a scary way due to falling through the cracks. Her friend from down the street and she were supposed to be attending the after-school program, a short walk down the hall from their kindergarten classroom. Instead, they somehow got herded onto the buses and sent home. The home where, y’know, they had no parents (or siblings; I was a freshman in college at this point) home for them. Fortunately, the other girl’s back door to their garage was open, and by the time the after-school program determined they were missing, got ahold of parents, and parents got home, the girls were found sitting the in the front window of the friend’s house, each with an arm around the dog, tears streaming down their faces as they waited for a parent to come and find them.
Nothing bad happened to them, but you can bet that no other little girls were so actively watched and monitored for the rest of the year after the two sets of parents were done with the school. The girls had tried to tell them that they weren’t bus students, but they were only five; what did they know?