tobermory's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do the bus stop It must really suck to be a kid these days. I took a different route to work today and as I meandered through suburbia I saw bunches of kids waiting for their school busses. On every corner. Are kids incapable of crossing a couple of streets to wait at, say, one consolidated bus stop per neighborhood? Also, does every kid�s parent really need to wait for the bus with them? Because judging from the ratio there was at least one parent per child. Don�t get me wrong, if this was in the city or in a questionable area I�d be all for parental supervision, but this was in a upscale suburb in an area of cute houses with tree lined streets filled with families consisting of two parents, 2.5 kids, a dog named Spot, a cat named Fluffy and a bowl of soon-to-die goldfish won in the Toss-a-Ball game at the recent Children�s Fair. Way back when I was little, every kid on Lincoln Ave. waited in front of Scooter Kelly�s house sans parents. Our dads were probably all on the way to work and our moms were probably at home mixing the first gin �n� tonic of the day and praising the school system for getting our pain-in-the-ass selves out of the house for at least 7 or 8 hours. If our parents all waited with us at the bus stop I would have never heard the facts of life misinterpreted by Tiffany and Kim � the Older Kids. I would have never learned to stand up against inevitable taunts when the circle of taunting came around to me. I probably would have still gotten interested in the novels of Nancy Drew Girl Detective, but I certainly would have never been invited to the secret session of Two Minutes in the Closet in which I went into the closet with Kip and we �gasp- stared at each other and giggled for two minutes. I think we might have also �frenched,� which consisted, in our complete inadequacy, of sticking our tongues out and touching them together. And then laughing our asses off, because really? What could adults see in THAT? Parents � the bus stop is a rite of passage for kids � don�t ruin it with your presence. And don�t even get me started on what I�m guessing are the totally sanitized versions of bus drivers that exist now. Bob the Hippie would have never made the cut and certainly the child-hating and dreaded Picklenose would have never graced my bus route��� Do any of you have fond bus-stop memories from your youth? 11:55 a.m. - 2007-06-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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