BUS STORY # 302 (Shorts 25)

Today, In The Parking Lot, © All Rights Reserved, a photo by dan.castro on Flickr.

There’s a bit of a traffic jam at the Yale-Kathryn intersection this morning. Seems there’s an unattended lawn mower waiting to make a left turn onto Kathryn.

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Kid gets on the bus just past Skateboard Park. He’s carrying his skateboard -- in three broken pieces.

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He’s into it. 15 or thereabouts, phone in left hand, wire running from phone to left ear piece, and he’s drumming on his thigh and moving his head, mouthing the lyrics and no holding back, with facial expressions that surely express the lyrics. For a moment, his right hand quits slapping his thigh, grasps an invisible drum stick, and bangs away.

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“[Ashrita Furman] has the record for the fastest mile with a milk bottle on one’s head: seven minutes and forty-seven seconds. In New York, in 1998, he walked 80.96 miles with a milk bottle on his head, which took twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes. While he was training, children sometime threw stones at the bottle and shot at it with slingshots. A man hoping to startle Furman into dropping the bottle sneaked up behind him and barked like a dog. People stopped him and asked for directions. A bus driver swerved into a puddle to drench him.” -- Alec Wilkinson, from “Higher, Faster, Madder” in The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011, p. 62.

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A bunch of kids are exiting through the front door for Cesar Chavez. The driver calls out, “Have a good day. And no fighting, hear?” There is some kind of response that the driver hears but I don’t. He points to one of them and says, “I heard all about you trying to fight the whole school yesterday. Try and behave yourself, OK?”

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The photo at the top of this story is titled “Today, In The Parking Lot,” © All Rights Reserved, and is posted with the kind permission of dan.castro. You can see all dan.castro’s photos on Flickr at: www.flickr.com/photos/72935557@N00/