School Bus Days
It snowed at little last night, depending on where you live. I turned on the TV to try to get an idea of what the commute would be like and should I drive or take the bus and which bus should I take. Bob didn't have to go to school until 10am.

The TV is almost completely worthless because they find the 3 iciest intersections in a 60 mile radius and set up cameras and tell you over and over how awful it is out there.

The things I look for are whether the newspaper arrived on time, whether the driveway is icy and whether traffic is moving on the cross street I can see from my front yard. This morning: Yes, No, Yes.

I hopped in the car, left extra early and found a few snowy patches before I hit the main street which was completely fine. Except there was a freaking bridge lift and it took 25 minutes to get on the freeway. Also note: once I left my neighborhood I did not seen another flake of snow on the ground.

Lorelei wrote something about the school bus last week which made me remember riding the bus in 7-8 grades. My Mom was the librarian at my school and I'm pretty sure I rode to school with her when I was in 6th grade. Once I turned into a pain-in-the-ass 13 year old with equally pain-in-the-ass girlfriends, I was too cool to go to school with my Mom.

Our bus was over-crowded and we were miserable brats. We went through a series of bus drivers before it stuck with a guy who looked like he'd just gotten out of prison, smudgy tattoos and all. His name was Terrence and he also had an earring which was not a common look for men in the 70's. There were two places for pickup in the morning, one was 5 houses down from mine at the Foster's and one was at the front of the housing development. Picture tract homes in southern California.

You saved your place in line at the bus stop by putting your books down starting at the curb and leading back into the Foster's driveway. You could run down early and put your book there to save your place and then go home and get ready. It's hard to believe middle schoolers honored this system. As soon as my alarm went off I ran down with my book. But no matter how early I got there, this girl named Jeanette's book was already there first. Always. She must have put her book there before she went to bed.

The absurd thing is that the bus picked up our stop first. There was no reason to be all worked up about getting on first. The bummer was for the second stop because by then all the seats were full and you had to go to 3 in a seat and no one wanted to sit 3 in a seat so there was all this awkwardness, especially for the kids nobody liked because they had to sit down. It's just like on public transportation where people put their coat and pack next to them so no one can sit next to them. You'd have to ask them to move over and on the school bus they'd look the other way and ignore you.

Then Terrence would get involved and yell at the kid to sit down and yell at the kids who wouldn't move over. Once the bus got rolling there was lots of yelling and carrying on. One time we were so bratty that Terrence drove us all the way back to school and had the principal come out and yell at us.

When I got to high school there was no bus and I went to school with the Tudman's until I was old enough to drive myself.