School Children
Krista Eastman We came into this world creatures of the yellow school bus, bouncing from seat to seat, screeching open windows one by one, letting loose the long blasts of our barn lowing. As creatures, we didn’t possess knowledge of history so much as knowledge of habitat, which we blithely extended all the way back to the bright dawn of time. Time began here, with us, the yellow bus quaking our small bones as we rumbled together down the same line. We took this bus to and from school, a sometimes cold, sometimes hot pocket of yelling, of disparate causes and declared allegiances, of different “home lives” roiling together in a peerless mix. And we took it on field trips, though these were a different affair, having the feel of momentous pursuit, the air of all of us, at long last, getting somewhere. At the helm of the bus, making the wide turns, sat Bill or Bob, Marv or John, a man in late middle age who knew all the country roads, who each morning came in from the quiet and kept a practical distance. What did he do while we were away, while we trampled the capital city or gawked at the zoo animals gawking back at us? We located intrigue in the flattest of mysteries and comedy in the smallest irregularities and so found something of interest in his oily bald spot, his unmatched socks, his two-sausage sack lunch. He is dead now, I assume. In the long tradition of narrative recollection, it’s customary to acknowledge, however briefly, the way Time has come for people we remember, to create a nostalgic distance into which we plop the wry bottom of our