It was bound to happen...

     Those who really know me were not absolutely convinced that I could stay as solely a stay-at-home parent forever. Too restless, or too much energy to be consumed, or too easily pulled into doing something which needs attention. So I am sure I will not surprise anyone I know when I admit that I just had to get involved in the neighborhood crisis recently.
    See, it has to do with the schools, and the kids, and the buses. Due to some colossal screw-up last year, the school system here dropped about 50 bus routes for kids that live within 2 miles of their school, when in prior years (that sticky word precedent) they picked them up. The most egregious errors involved mistakes in which a school was indeed only a 1/2 mile away from the particular neighborhood-but it was across on the other side of the interstate. Most parents don't fancy the idea of their children walking to school across ten lanes of 70 mph traffic. Especially the kindergartners. So there was a huge swell of criticism, finger-pointing, and lawsuit-threatening by angry parents at the school board meeting, and the response from the school board was to go into crisis hiring mode, trying to call back to work all the drivers that it had previously lost or let go, holding job fairs, sending emails to all parents in the district, and slapping "Hiring bus drivers" signs on all buses and school billboards. My neighborhood was one which lost its service to the elementary school a mile away, and the bus debacle was the topic of sidewalk conversation from August to now.
    Which sort of explains why I was sitting down at the Texas Department of Public Safety this morning parallel parking "old number 459" for an examiner to pass my CDL exam. Yeah-that's right. Parallel park. A school bus. I can.
    Can you?

    Okay, I thought, why don't I take this little part-time job to help out the school? Work a couple of hours in the morning and in the afternoon, summers off, weekends off, any time school is out of session I am home. Save a little money to finance going back to school when I establish in-state residency here in Texas. Get state benefits in the form of some sort of pension or other, get to drive a school bus-a school bus!-and get paid a decent little check for it. Clock in, clock out, go home, easy job, right?
     So a funny thing happened on the way to the bus depot....
     So after a couple of weeks of training I have passed all my exams. Written exams on the intricacies of air brakes and freight-loading, and then road tests in which one must demonstrate an inhumanly icy control of sixteen tons of yellow metal wrapped around a chugging diesel engine that catches the wind like the side of the Sears Tower and makes turns like an aircraft carrier. And  I have ridden as a trainee/observer with other drivers who range from control freaks who wish they could strap their kids down and duct tape their mouths shut all the way to over-friendly aging hippies who call everyone "dude" and ignore anything going on as long as it doesn't involve projectiles, bodily fluids, or litter. Especially litter, because you have to clean up your own bus.
     And the grand lesson I take home from everything I've seen happening is a lesson that I already know so well. There are drivers who say they got a bad route and got bad kids this year. Their buses are almost uniformly chaotic and unfriendly, hostile and unwelcoming. Every day is a struggle for power, and the only resolution comes in fruitless meetings with the principal between driver, student, and parents. Then there are drivers who say they have the best route there is, and their kids are great. These kids say hello when they get on the bus, they say goodbye and thanks when they exit. Sure, they make noise and act like kids, but everyone likes to unwind after a day at work-which school is for them.
     And these drivers all pick up kids at the same schools and drop them off in the same neighborhoods. So the kids that got off my bus today laughing and smiling live right down the street from the ones that argued with their driver, left trash on the bus, or threw coats across 3 rows of seats. The difference I can see is that the drivers with "good" kids engage them daily, maybe just nodding at them and saying hello as they enter and goodbye as they leave. Remembering their names, how to pronounce them. The lesson is that everyone matters.
     Everyone has a name, and everyone deserves to hear himself or herself called by it. Maybe a nod and a smile every so often. Just like adults, kids are people, and I see daily that the way we approach people and approach life has immediate effect upon our circumstances and situations. There are some things, indeed, over which I have no control, but treating people as I like to be treated is always in my reach. I have never been in a situation in which a word of interest or kindness to someone else has not positively changed the atmosphere.
    Even if it has only changed the way I think about the other person.
    So I daily affirm the profound truth that how I act has immediate and positive consequences for my life.
     
     And did I mention that I can parallel park a bus! Yes, a school bus. Can you?