The Joy of Childhood
© Leah Reindl 2012
So I went on an outing with one of my grandsons and his Kindergarten class. You may remember this child–The Boy whose antics keep Grandma hopping.
I honestly thought he was going to be the difficult child on the trip, but it turns out that he has an image to maintain (already) and his little mates believe he is the soul of reason. His teachers adore him.
(See Grandma’s look of shocked disbelief.)
However, I did have the pleasure of riding on the school bus in the seat directly in front of the ‘interesting child’ in the class, a little firecracker we’ll call Mercy. Her voice was beyond piercing–my ears are still ringing.
First though, you have to picture the school bus packed with 6-year olds, each one in varying stages of that mania only a 6 year old child can bring to such an event. The adult volunteers were given groups of 3 children each to monitor. We lined up outside the school at the curb, and got on the bus, keeping our groups in order. My daughter and I shared our group, which worked out well.
The first thing I noticed was the amazing lack of leg-room in Grandma’s seat. That and the fact that nowadays Grandma seems to take up more than half of the bench.
Oops.
Still, two of ‘my’ children were able to sit on the bench with me, and despite the fact that my knees were firmly pressed into the back of the seat in front of me, we rode fairly comfortably.
Directly behind me was the girl who we’ll call Mercy. She was imaginative, boisterous, and full of ‘it’. She wore her emotions for everyone to clearly see, and every thought that entered her mind was immediately expressed, loudly, twice for emphasis. She was needy, loud, inappropriate and hysterically funny.
Mercy was the poster-child for ADHD.
As the large yellow sardine can I was trapped in hurtled down I-5, Mercy’s commentary dominated the din. “Look at that dude! He’s smoking a cigar. I’ll bet he’s a gangsta. He’s gonna do a deal. I saw it on TV.”
“Mercy, that’s inappropriate. We don’t talk like that, remember?” The lady who was Mercy’s wrangler was awesome. She was an older lady who volunteered at the school and who was also the school crossing guard. I suspect she was a retired teacher, as she had opted to wrangle the three toughest discipline cases in the class.
The other two were boys and they were…interesting…, but Mercy was the real loose-cannon in the bunch. She was the ringleader, the one the other two looked up to.
Just around the time I noticed I had lost the feeling in my legs, the school bus pulled alongside of a long semi, an open-top box trailer that was covered with a canvas tarp. A corner of the tarp had come loose, and flapped in the wind as the truck rolled down the highway, giving a tantalizing peek at the contents of the load. (It was sawdust.)
Mercy said, “Look that truck is broken. I wonder what’s in it? It’s probably going to crash, cuz its broken.”
Her seatmate, a boy we’ll call Dewayne, said, “It won’t crash. That’s just the tarp. I wonder what’s under it?”
Mercy said, “It’s broken, so it’s gonna fly off and kill someone and there’ll be blood everywhere. We’ll probably be on the news when it happens. And it’s a dinosaur, under the tarp. A dead one.”
Dewayne said, “How do you know its a dead dinosaur? It could be any sort of dead body.”
“Human bodies aren’t that big. It has to be a dinosaur.” Mercy’s tone implied that she held the trump card. “I wonder where they’re going to bury it.”
All I could think of was that the seat behind me was occupied by two future authors of fantasy crime fiction, and the girl could possibly be a future Quentin Tarantino. This little girl was hysterically funny, obsessed with the macabre, totally off the wall and sharper than a tack.
I was SO grateful she was not in our group, as she was fast as lightning, didn’t hear any instructions, and made her own rules as she went.
It was a fun trip.
Grandma needed a nap when we got home.
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Life in the Realm of Fantasy 