Blue Bird School Bus

My little sister and me ran across the parking lot to the train station. Waiting in line a careless man holding a lit cigarette crowded my mother. Her best and only flower-print traveling dress carried a small black-rimmed hole all the way from Melville, Saskatchewan, to Montreal. That was in 1966 and my uncle and aunt took us driving over a bridge to the island where they were building Expo. That night we went to a Chinese restaurant and we sat on red cushions with tassels and I pretended to be sick so I didn’t have to eat what wasn’t meat and potatoes. Later, walking down ceramic-tiled stairs to the car park a thin man was reaching for a swaddled baby that was held by a mother in a tan coat. She was swearing at the man and my uncle Johnny stepped between them and in a hard low voice he warned the man with words I couldn’t hear. The stranger’s head jerked back and strands of hair leapt away from his face and I noted his eyes weren’t right. The next day I saw people on their knees going up the cement steps of a giant church named Notre Dame Basilica. Most of them were old, some seemed sick, one had grey bandages tied around a dragging foot. Behind the church was a small stone hut where a person in a robe told us an odd story full of what he called adversity about the first priest, which is like our preacher. And then we took a Greyhound to Brandford, Ontario, where my father pushed open the swing-doors of a brand new Blue Bird School Bus and we got in and drove it all the way home. On the highway my little sister and I made a game of waving at people in cars and trucks and I remember being very happy even though my sister always got more waves than me. And I thought how lucky to be driving miles and miles with mom and dad at the front, occasionally chatting, and my sister and me by ourselves in a 54-seat school bus with all this space to run — safe from strangers and free of adversity.