We write to remember and for some reason I want to remember this.

I was weeding the flowerbed in the front yard.

Here comes a Somali girl, maybe ten years old, running down the sidewalk to catch the bus. Her mother is yelling only what I can take to be encouragement from behind, near their house. It’s a rental on the corner of a busy street. I wish I can remember everyone who passed through there. A Black family. A little girl who seemed to always be dressed in pink. I big woman with a baby. A teen boy. They often walked by my house. And then they were gone and it was another family. And now this family.

As the girl is running, a school bus is inching behind her. Had it stopped she could have just turned around and got on it. But she is running and it seems like the driver is trying to give her the best chance of making it to the stop at the end of the block on time. So the bus is creeping along side her, encouraging her as her mother was doing. The sound of her shoes hitting the pavement brings to mind a thin sandal. Slap! Slap! Slap! Against the orange-yellow school bus and a pretty blue sky, her pink burka looks like a costume designer picked it out. It’s pretty.

She gets on the bus. I look back at her mother from my crouched position in the yard. She looks relieved.

“She made it!” I yell.

“Yes she did!” the girl’s mother yells back.

My neighbor heads out on his bike. He makes a comment about how I am up early.

“I’m usually up early.” I say.

“Not as early as my wife. Three o’clock.” He says.

Coincidentally, I notice the girl come home that afternoon. A little boy on tricycle and an even smaller girl carrying a doll are rushing down the sidewalk to greet her. They’re excited. Super happy. But once they get to the bus stop at the end the block the crying starts. They’re arguing over who-knows-what – the bike, the doll, who gets to hold whose hand. They’re bugging each other the way siblings do.

The next morning I am in my bedroom where the windows are open.

“Get on the fuck’n bus!” A man down in the street yells.

I imagine that some poor kid is getting in trouble. He doesn’t want to go to school and his asshole father is pissed because he won’t get on the bus. How is he going to have a good day now? I look out the window and see there is a bit of a jam up on the street. I don’t exactly remember the details, but the bus can’t pass to get to the stop and apparently the little girl I saw is boarding the bus mid street. This is not exactly clear to me. What is clear is that there is a guy in a beat up pickup truck with a ladder in the back. He’s headed toward the bus and hanging slightly out the window trying to see what the hold up is. Once things dislodge he roars down the street, clearly mad. Cursing.

We have these peaceful days. Our mother is encouraging us. The bus driver is helping. We look beautiful. The sun is beautiful. The air is fresh. Things are blooming. And then some guy plops down in the middle of it and yells profanity at a child. Who is that guy? Don’t be that guy!

It had been a while since I’ve noted the trips to and from the bus stop. But recently from my room I heard:

Slap! Slap! Slap!

“I love you, mom!”

–

I have my own “missing the school bus story”, but I actually missed the bus. Long story short, I was standing at the stop and the bus whizzed by without picking me up. My dad was not happy about this. We got in the car and chased the bus down the highway for a bit before we caught up to it and I got on it. This would have been between kindergarten and second grade in Michigan.

–

Next up? Coffee. Something to eat. Progress on my projects. Petting the cat. Right now she is pestering Brian who just got out of the shower. When she saw that I was busy, she turned and faced the bathroom door and pounced on him the second he emerged. I’ll have to dust myself off earlier than usual tonight. We’re going to go see Patton Oswalt at the State Theater. Brian and I are now arguing about how many times we’ve seen him. I say two. He says once because the only other time he came here, he came to a casino, not my favorite place to see shows. He is so wrong. Forget my plans for the day. I’m going to spend the rest of the day proving that he is wrong, dammit! We saw him twice! I am certain of it, although I will concede that it definitely was not at a casino. In one show he closed with the Doctor Pepper story, which the audience was clamoring for… the other time… I don’t care! It was twice! I do remember passing on Bill Burr because he was at a casino and maybe the same is true of Oswalt. But still… Twice.