When I was five, we lived in Athens.
Athens, Tennessee, that is. The kid next door at our previous house didn't believe there was any such place when I told him where we were moving: he insisted we were moving to Georgia. In his defense, Athens, Georgia, was about four times as large as its Tennessee counterpart in 1989. I don't know about the late 80s, but today the closest Red Lobster to Athens is about two counties away.
There weren't too many academic options in McMinn County at the time, so I started kindergarten that fall at North City. The town probably only had two elementary schools, and I have always assumed that this was the more northerly of the two. Whatever the case, my parents only had two kids at the time and it was a small town, so my Mom drove me to school in the mornings and picked me up in the afternoons.
As it turns out, we didn't stay in Athens long. We moved to Memphis at the end of October. There was just one thing I wanted to do before we left, though: ride the school bus.
I don't know why riding the school bus held such mystique. I knew kids at school who rode the bus, and I saw the buses come and go from the school parking lot. For whatever reason, riding the bus seemed like the thing to do, a great thrill I had been missing. So I asked if I could ride the bus home on my last day.
For some unknown reason, my mother said yes.
The great thing about being a kid is innocence. We usually think of that term in the sense of "not having done" a thing. But more fundamentally, it's about knowledge: innocence is not knowing how a thing comes about. Kids don't have innocence because they haven't committed crimes, they're innocent because they don't know how to commit them.
I was innocent that day: innocent about how school buses worked. And the bus driver was innocent too, because nobody had bothered to make whatever the arrangements are one makes to ensure that a kid gets dropped off at the right place by a school bus. (To this day I still don't know what that process entails.) I knew the school bus went near our house. And I watched out the window as lots of kids were dropped off right in front of their houses. So, with childlike faith and innocence, I concluded that the bus driver would somehow know to drop me right in front of my house. I thus watched with anticipation as he dropped two other kids at an intersection a few streets over from our house.
And then I watched with a tightening stomach as he drove past the turn to our house, away from our neighborhood, and dropped the rest of the elementary-school children. At some point towards the end of that process, he realized that I wasn't on his route and hadn't gotten off at the most sensible place (and that I had no idea what to do with myself at this point). But he had a whole route of high schoolers to drop off, so he couldn't do anything with me right then. So I rode all over McMinn County huddled in a corner with a bus full of high school kids around me.
Eventually I was able to tell the driver where on the route I lived and he took me home. I don't recall whether my mother was terrified at the delay or simply assumed that school buses took a really long time. To this day I worry about knowing where the stops are when I get on a train or bus.