Letter: The Wheels on the Bus

They hadn’t been traveling together long, the school bus driver and her aide, but what the two struck up a friendship.

If it were the first day of school, the two women – the driver and her aide – would smile and wait patiently as children posed for a picture on the porch by mom or dad while little brother, still wrapped in a blanket, peered from behind the door watching this rite of passage.

Every day, as the little kiddos mounted the steps, assisted by the aide, some might be granted but one hug from the driver, no more, though many more were sought, but all children, without exception, received a smile, a welcome, and were called by name.

The aide, new on the route, observed how love and laughter gently rocked the bus with each exchange between driver and child, both at the start of the day in those early morning hours when sleepy children mounted the steps, and at the end of the day when the goodbyes were just as sweet.

As the days went by the aide was to find in the school bus driver a friend, someone she was to need, as it turned out, desperately.

It was the anniversary.

Not the anniversary celebrating love, but the anniversary of devastating sorrow. Not the annual reminder of gladness, but the nudge of grief.

And not a nudge either, but rather her sudden tears were accompanied by an unsuppressed cry, a sudden eruption from the soul, a heaviness of heart erupting from her inmost being.

And it happened right there on the bus, the empty bus, empty except for the driver and her weeping aide.

And there on the empty bus the aide emptied her heart, sobbing out her story, and the driver listened, hugged her and she cried too.

“Sorrow,” someone wrote, “is the fundamental condition of humanity.”

“No rose without a thorn” is common in all languages.

“Sorrow and life are very near of kin,” said another.

Still another: “Outward mirth often cloaks hidden sorrow.”

And still another: “Why weep his eyes when in his heart he laughs?”

As surely as the wheels on the bus go round and round, there is within every human heart a story of sadness, of love, and of loss.

Every one.

Please be kind.