bl(ip)og

Yesterday morning was GORGEOUS! It’s almost if May couldn’t wait to get here and kicked the last few days of March (and all of April) out of its way.
Because I had to be at work on time (it’s my week to carry the duty phone), I decided to take the ‘back roads’. [I qualify this route as 'back roads' because it's mostly old 2-lane roads with cavernous ditches on either side (but only in the areas where the swamp itself doesn't come up to the edge of the road).] The ‘back roads’ route is 8 miles longer than my regular route, but it rarely involves traffic so is usually a lot quicker.

Halfway to work, the sun was blazing, windows were down, WNIS “Macrini’s Morning News Team” was squaking out of the speakers, when some twat decided to pull her big yellow bus out from of a neighborhood side street, pretty much cutting me off. To be fair, I don’t consider all women driving busses twats. This lady just happened to qualify because there was nobody following me — if she could have waited 5 freaking seconds, she could have more safely entered the road, and more importantly — WOULDN’T HAVE TRAPPED ME BEHIND HER! (!@#$)

The bus went for a few blocks and then put on the yellow lights, answering my question of whether or not the bus had already picked up all of the kids and was just heading to school. As we braked to a halt, I couldn’t figure out why she was even stopping — there was an intersection to a side-street (with some of those new huge brick-houses-with-no-yards), but it was oddly sans kids waiting to be picked up. It did, however, have about 8 cars, on both sides of the street, parked very close to each other, all facing towards the road.

As the bus ground to a stop, one by one, the doors on these cars would open, depositing a little kid (looking between 6-8yrs old). Backpack slapping on their backs (except for the two with the ‘flight attendant’ style), they’d sprint up and climb aboard the bus.

As the kids pushed and shoved to see who sits where (they will be GREAT Southwest airline customers), the 8 cars that were parked on the side street all started slowly driving in reverse, down the side street, single-file, each pulling into its proper driveway.

As with most of my journal entries, “you would have had to have been there”, but man, this synchonized event was really worth its own Twilight Zone episode!

This made me wonder “since when did kids need sheltering from sunny mid-60’s spring mornings”? And what was the deal with a parental unit for each kid?! What the heck happened to that one cool mom that never worked who watched everyone’s kid at the bus stop? I know that the June Cleaver style mom has long since gone, but ack, surely not the mom’s from MY growing up!

I know that Amazon says that everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten, but I do recall learning a few things by interacting with the other shitheads like me while waiting for the bus to pick us up each morning. We didn’t all get along, but when you have to stand out in the searing heat or freezing winds, there’s a bit of bonding that inevitably happens — it’s part of growing up.

I couldn’tt help feeling a little sorry for these tykes, stuck in mom’s climate-controlled SUV, probably watching some kids videos, … missing out on all of that fun while waiting for the twat in the big yellow bus to come pick them up.