Community Magazine December 2019

Style SPIRIT & FORTHEWOMANOFTODAY MIRIAM SASSON eel free to read about my latest drama if you’re made of tough stuff. However, pass on this article if you’re among the faint of heart (as I am) or if you are a first-time, panicky mom considering putting your adorable preschooler on a school bus. Here’s the lowdown: On a typical day, my son Ezra finishes school at 3:10pm. Since he gets off at the first stop, he arrives home between 3:09 and 3:15. (Yes, yes, I am aware of the technical difficulty there, but that is how it is.) Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, so when 3:20 came and went, I kept my cool. Maybe there’s heavy traffic? An accident? At 3:30pm I gave the school a ring. No hysteria, just curiosity. “Orange bus is pulling out now,” was the secretary’s explanation. “There’s a substitute driver and he only came now. Sorry.” Right. He’ll be here any second. I continued to lean against a tree. I’ll interject here that I was shivering from cold. I hadn’t had a jacket on me because I thought I’d only be a minute. Moreover, there was a light drizzle outside which had slowly morphed into a steady rainfall. 3:40pm. Where is my son?! Gone was the calm, cool, and collected person I was a few minutes earlier. What do I do? What do I do? Next, I dialed Rivka, a fellow mother of an Orange Bus kid. “Yep,” she chirped. “There was a sub and my Yaakov got home a few minutes late. So, no worries there!” “Got home?” I sputtered. “You mean your son got home already?!” Rivka raised her voice incredulously. “Uh - you mean yours didn’t?” “Nope.” I was in such a panic, it could be I thanked Rivka for her help, it could be I hung up on her. Probably the latter, if I had to guess. My phone’s battery was on low, I noticed, as I redialed the school. “Strange,” the secretary commented when I filled her in. “The driver should have been by you ages ago.” Oh, how I know. “But as I said, there was a substitute today. You just never know with these new drivers. I say don’t worry and be patient.” I waited, full of worry. I’d begun to conjure up pathetic images of my poor little five-year-old’s tear-soaked face. Is Ezra cold? Is he alone? How incredibly scared he must feel! At 4:41, a bus pulled up. About ten older boys from another elementary school flew off the bus and scattered off. Oddly enough, so did my son – my delicious Ezra. He carefully alighted from the giant yellow monster. As you can imagine, I grabbed him into the fiercest embrace of love and emotion. An onlooker would have thought I had not seen this boy in six months. As for Ezra, he was clueless. He was removed from any worry. And why not? He doesn’t tell time, so he couldn’t know how late it was. He knows that substitutes do things differently, so he had no idea that something was amiss. He had spent ninety minutes playing with his buddies while I had spent the same amount of time worrying. Later, I learned that there were no substitutes available, so the bus service combined two routes, that of my son’s school with that of another, and that the driver decided to complete the route with all those boys backwards – leaving my son’s stop for… last. But I also learned something else. It dawned on me that I had spent all that time worrying, wondering, and imagining as only a panicky mother can. Imagine if I could have been as blissful and as trusting as my son riding along on the school bus! Which got me thinking – I am journeying in this transitory world with the most trustworthy Driver in the world. Hashem is carrying me along on this journey. Sometimes the ride is smooth, and yet other times there are bumps along the way. If I would only trust that He is taking me precisely where I need to go at precisely the right moment, I would experience that precious feeling of bliss on the bus. Blissful on the Bus peaks life F 58 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE