Give me what's mine and let me go

I'm home and having a wonderful time here -- despite the fact that Javier is unwell -- but I feel compelled to tell you about something that happened last week while I was still in Georgia.

I wanted to come home on Friday but as it happened I had traveled on the previous Saturday to Georgia with Erica, in her car, leaving my car for TG to use.

Why? Because "The clutch has finally gone out!" on his truck (the one that got bashed by the neighbor's tree and remains crumpled despite a more-than-generous insurance settlement).

I didn't want him to have to walk everywhere.

Imagine the time of day he'd need to leave for church if he were on foot. Twice on Sunday; once after dark! And what if the weather didn't cooperate?

People used to walk practically everywhere but that was before the Interstates.

At any rate if I'd had my car in Georgia I would have left there around noon last Friday all by me onesie.

That's because Erica was gone all day, until midnight.

Audrey had returned to Knoxville on Wednesday, One Two. Javier was chilling back in Columbia with TG, feeling the effects of being ninety-one in wintertime. I was alone at Erica's house in suburban Atlanta. 

We had the Southeast covered.

But, "Why was Erica gone all day until midnight on Friday?" you may be thinking.

Because in addition to being a high school math teacher, she coaches her school's girls' basketball teams.

And they had a game on Friday, an away game, far away. Like, a three-plus-hour drive away, requiring them to leave school well before noon.

"Why on earth didn't you go with her?" you may be thinking, or even saying out loud to your computer screen, palms up like I'm hard to figure out or even there in the room with you.

Two words: School Bus. Emphasis mine.

As in, that's how the teams and coaches traveled three-plus hours each way, to and from the games, starting out at noon, eating twice at fast-food joints, returning at midnight: on a school bus.

Do you know how many hours I have traveled to and from basketball games on school buses that top out at fifty miles per hour pedal to the metal, arriving home around the witching hour at the end of an exhausting week? In wintertime?

Neither do I. But trust me, it's lots more miles than TG would have had to walk last week if I'd taken my car to Georgia. Even if he went to church every day and twice on Sunday.

All four of our kids played multiple sports -- that covers approximately fifteen seasons of soccer, volleyball, and basketball -- and TG coached sports for over thirty years.

Not being any stripe whatsoever of an athlete, I have never played a sport. My role was ride, watch, cheer, wait, repeat. And if I say so, I did it all admirably.

But when they talk abut the glory days on court or field, do my exploits ever come up? I'll leave you to answer that all by your onesie.

At any rate I had a largely uneventful day at Erica's house, which happens to be sort of out in the country, situated across a fairly busy two-lane road from the school where she teaches, which is a ministry of the church she attends.

Which means I can peep out the window or front door and see the impressively pristine and large church/school campus presided over by a huge American flag.

On Friday I was busy doing laundry and making cookies and blogging and reading and generally not minding being home alone.

Erica texted me a few times during the day and then, at eleven twenty-three that night, while I was deeply into reading my book Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-In-Training, she texted thus:

We'll be home in about 30. Please come get me when we get in! :)

(I'll never understand why people don't give that little happy texty face a nose. All it takes is a hyphen! A single stroke! But I digress.)

My daughter had walked to work seventeen hours earlier, having found her car covered with morning frost and having realized, as she often does in winter, that it would take less time to walk across the road than to defrost the vehicle.

At eleven thirty-six (I don't remember why it took me so long) I texted back:

Ok where are your keys?

Then, not waiting for a reply, I put on shoes and a warm shawl and my gloves and pitched my sorry phone into my purse.

I looked out the window and saw that cars were already populating the school/church parking lot, some with their lights on.

Parents waiting. I know that drill.

Finding Erica's spare keyfob on a shelf beside the back door, I drove her car across the street. I parked next to a lady who, when I glanced over, seemed to wake up from a doze. She smiled and I smiled.

I knew I had a teensy wait but not an unmanageable one. Erica's CD player was giving me Josh Groban so I was content.

At some point I fished in my purse for my phone and found I'd missed Erica's text answering my last question concerning the whereabouts of her car keys.

She'd texted at eleven fifty:

On the shelf by the back door. it will be another 20. i was deceived.

*crickets*

By my reckoning that would put Erica there at about twelve ten. At least a ten-minute wait for me, if they were on the money.

I let my eyes cross in boredom.

Not five minutes later, at exactly midnight -- I am talking on the nose and I do not mean a hyphen, y'all -- that twinkling school bus lumbered into view on the two-lane road and turned in at one of the church/school entrances.

Parents nodding off behind the wheels of their cars shook themselves, turned on lights, began looking around.

The bus came to a stop and the doors opened and sleepy kids carrying pillows and backpacks and iPhones and iPads and McDonald's bags began stumbling out.

My kid was one of the first ones to set shoe leather to asphalt. I switched on her car's headlights.

Funny: Even with cell phones and other high-tech devices of communication, parents still wait for at least half an hour in the cold night for their children to arrive from athletic trips.

Why? You may be thinking or asking, if you are still awake and remotely interested.

The answer is in the final words of Erica's final text to me that night: "i was deceived."

Who deceived her? Why, the bus driver, of course. Coach of the boys' basketball team. Good man.

Fifty miles out he yelled back to the kids: "Tell your parents we'll be at the school in thirty minutes."

What did Erica do? Texted her mother that she'd be at the school in thirty minutes.

Only, she wasn't. A cursory look out the window of the bus at a green sign beside the Interstate would have told her she wouldn't be.

The next day, while having supper with TG in Augusta where we met for him to collect me, we told him about the blatant lie.

He chuckled. "Old bus driver slash coach trick," he said.

Turns out TG, who has driven dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of school buses full of snoring student athletes untold miles through the cold darkness on black ribbons of highway in several states, was savvier than either Erica or me.

Tired coaches doubling as bus drivers fib about their ETA because that way, they don't have to cool their aching heels while waiting for parents to show up and cart their kids home.

The parents bite every time. Be there in thirty minutes? Great! And they leap into their automobiles and drive to the school, where they wait for at least a half hour.

One would think they'd be outside their cars once the bus rolled in, hands on hips, feet tapping, in high dudgeon, and that they'd queue up at the still-closed bus door to take issue with the lying bus driver who told their kids to tell them thirty more minutes.

But they're not and they don't. They just want to get what's theirs and go home.

Erica flopped into the passenger seat of her car and I put the engine in reverse. We only had to go a hundred yards but I was anxious.

Across the parking lot teenagers still staggered zombie-like, silhouetted in the headlights of those waiting cars.

"Hold on," Erica said. She scanned the area for her charges. "Okay. They're all gone."

That was easy.

And that is all! For now.

=0=0=0=

Happy Monday! Happy Week!

Comments

[Debbie]

Old bus driver trick, oh my. I see their point, but not exactly fair to the parents, who will have visions of bus wrecks running through their heads.

[Mari]

I too have sat in a parking lot waiting for kids who always were later than predicted. I never thought the driver may be tricking us! I've also been with van loads of kids when we were youth leaders at church. We would come back from a retreat and wait forever for some of those parents. Could have used that trick myself! :-) (Like that nose?)

[irene]

Your a good mom, and a good waiter, for your kids. 30 min. isn't so bad.

[Skunkfeathers]

Someone ALWAYS has a texting device ;-) And I didn't forget the nose LOL...