Waiting for the Bus

A school bus paced me through my morning run on Tuesday. It was just a trial trip through the neighborhood for the bus, timing the route, getting ready for the real thing on Wednesday morning. 

As the bus wound along the same streets I ran, passing me, then turning dow a cul-de-sac so I could retake the lead, then passing me again, I thought about  the reactions that bus would have gotten from me at different stages in my life.

As a child on the last day of summer before the first day of school, that bus would kindle the dismay that, yes, summer really was over. The next morning that bus would mean business. The next morning, my friends and I would be “in our places, with bright smiling faces,” as the old school jingle used to run, launching into a new school year. A school year was an infinitely long period of time—something akin to an era or epoch—you know, geological time when millions of years pass before you reach the end. That bus making a trial run was a harbinger. It was a scout, seeking the strength and numbers of us kids. Best to hide in the closet and hope no one realized you were missing from the table at dinner. 

As the parent of young school-age children, that bus making its test run was like the first robin of spring! The end was near! No more scrambling to find camps, sitters, playdates, or grandparents to fill up the great vacancy of time to cover with children far too young to leave at home by themselves. With two parents working, the pressure built in March, threatening climactic overload by late May when there might still be whole weeks of summer break unaccounted for. Ah, but there was the bus. The trip across the desert of summer was almost done. Tomorrow those little people would ascend into the bus and we could sing with gusto, “FREE AT LAST!” In one of our old neighborhoods—I promise this is true—when that bus finally pulled away with a load of elementary students aboard, moms popped the bubbly on the sidewalk! 

Now, as the parent of one young adult making his way into the world as a college graduate and our youngest preparing to wrap up her own collegiate studies this year, I confess the bus makes me a little nostalgic. I remember snapping “first day” photos through the years. I remember the slight trepidation of entrusting the youngest among us to the care of school. I remember the nervous delight of watching them drive themselves to school for the first time. I remember the excited turmoil of that first morning through the years. I remember the angst of the students repeatedly filing through their closets to find exactly the right outfit for the first day, convinced first impressions would cement in place forever social status and belonging and being cool. The rumble of bus along the street brought the search to a sudden end. The day began. All of that is over for us now. As I ran along with the bus, it hit for how long that time has been over. Years have slipped past. The bus no longer has anything to do with anybody at my house. In fact, the bus no longer even stops where it once did at the foot of the hill in front of our house. A lot of us in the neighborhood have aged out of the bus and all it carries. The bus now is simply a sign of changing seasons, of moving into fall (albeit summer will remain in full charge for a while yet). It is in someone else’s story now.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

For me, it is endlessly fascinating how that perspective changes through the years—you are in one place one year, another shortly thereafter, and still another after that. Talking to my parents reveals they no longer even notice when the school year runs, noting only its vague beginning in “late August” and the amorphous ending “sometime in June,” the actual schedule of Rockingham County Schools in Virginia totally irrelevant to them. That stance awaits me somewhere in the future. There will come a morning when I will be surprised by the bus. It will come while I am still sort of recollecting freshly being a parent at the bus stop.

See, we can move from one perspective into another without realizing our perspective changed. Something just rises up that jolts us into recognition that the current context isn’t ours. 

God alone is timeless.

God is fully present with each child a-twitter at the bus stop that first morning. God is fully present with each parent waiting there, waiting for the moment to come. God is with each of us no longer really involved in it. God is with all of us exactly as God needs to be there, with gifts of grace for each heart, mind, and spirit to see them through. 

God is in every perspective all at once.

May God bless and keep everyone embarking on a new school year in whatever way they are.