The three of us went to the grocery store this afternoon; I got out of work early, they got home early, and we never get to be together on Friday afternoons. Grocery store: fine. Everybody happy. We're by the chicken when a man with a limp and some white residue on his lip starts calling L by name. None of us recognized him. Turned out he was L's school bus driver from last year. Out of context, he didn't ring a bell.
He started talking, and he wouldn't stop, and it was an hour before I could get away. His perspective was not unfamiliar to me: his last name is on the firehouse one town over--he came from a line of cops and firemen, and volunteer army. He, though, is not volunteer army, or cop: he limps, and had a gastric bypass, and has a thick head and a thuggish sound; he drives a school bus, and talks big about how he would give his life for these kids, and how he carries a blunted axe in the bus to protect the kids in the event of a threat. (Um, blunted AXE??) Not an edge of crazy, exactly, but an edge, certainly. He told me about the union's struggle for a benefit package: how he had just paid $2,100 at the emergency room when he fell down some stairs. He expressed the resentment that's always there in a town like this: the relationship between the service people and the ones served, and the presumption of guilt in a dispute always being on the service people. He told the other side of a case that's in the local papers: an old driver suing the bus company for discrimination after they fired him for performance issues. ("Everybody knows old John," he says. "Any workers are getting the shaft and John's the first one to stand up and say, 'Now hang on a second--that just ain't right!' He stood up, and this time he got fired.") I actually knew that driver: knew him and liked him a lot, and I believe the tale this guy told.
It would never fly, if we all really knew each other as individuals. We'd drown in guilt for things we can't control. It works only because Milt is the driver, and doesn't really tell us his worldview and his circumstances, and his apparent affection for the kids keeps his resentment of their parents in check. So they don't know it's there.
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