The Yellow Bus

It‘s close to 3:00 on a warm Tuesday afternoon, and since I’ve bought ice cream and haven’t packed a cooler, I decide to drive home the back way and miss the elementary school traffic jam throughout the center of town.

My dream of beating the system vanishes when I notice a lumbering yellow bus ahead, turning down the same back road I’ll be taking. Sure enough, it slows further within half a mile or so and the driver flings out the red stop sign. I pull up a respectful six or seven car lengths behind, mind racing. I’m wondering if I can reach home before the ice cream begins to melt, trying to remember what I’ve planned for dinner and how much prep is left, and hoping I’ll have time to process the two-pound ginger root I bought for eight dollars.

Stop, I tell myself, and looking out the windshield, I notice two people standing on the side road, one on a bicycle and the other holding back a floppy-eared dog. I can’t see the bus’s exit door, but the dog can and when it springs forward—tongue out as if to taste them—I know the door’s been opened. A moment later, the kids dart towards the group, backpacks flapping, and I feel a softening inside me, a big Awwwww escaping from my lungs.

A little further on the bus slows again. This time, I am fully alert, a slavering voyeur parked in the middle of a seldom-used road, no one behind me, window partially open to let in the warm air, no longer worrying about ice cream, dinner, or ginger.

The adults have arrived in a four-wheeler or a farm cart perhaps, and the children hurtle towards them like goslings or soft-shelled turtles in their oversized backpacks. Grateful for the few moments it takes for the bus to compose itself, I am mesmerized by the scene before me, the group focused on something inside the cart. I’m tempted to pull over and see for myself, imagining a puppy, or a tin of warm cookies.

The air pushes against my face, transporting me to my school years, when I knew nothing of war and depravity, and before I began making burdensome lists to keep me engaged with the mundane. I notice my longer-than-usual exhales, how they are inadvertently massaging my vagus nerve, and engaging my parasympathetic system. I don’t need a therapist, I just need to get behind a school bus every now and then.

We are moving again, the bus and I, and I grow excited when it slows for a third time. Two kids in homemade haircuts leap toward an aproned woman straddling a John Deer riding mower. I wonder what they’ll be having for dinner, picturing them eating together at one table like families did when I was a child.

A grey-haired couple sits on their front porch across the street, bathing in the same slice of ‘50s Americana, no doubt taking refuge in their imaginations, like me. Children, family, subsidized transportation, a rural road, spring air, dogs, bicycles, lawn mowers and aprons. A simple world. One to breathe easy in.

I’m disappointed when the driver turns off the main road, leaving empty asphalt ahead. I lick my lips, savoring the taste of my brief visit back in time, and reemerge into this day’s decade.