remember

bus 4 loves carol

i rode the bus to and from school every day until i was fourteen and old enough to drive. in conway springs, our bus number was bus 4. the ride to school was a short five-mile journey, with the bus stopping at only a few homes before dropping us off at at the elementary door. the way home, however, was another story: we were literally the last kids on the route and spent at least an hour on the bus each afternoon, finally getting home after four o'clock most days.

i remember the heat of the kansas afternoons. we pushed in the tabs on all the windows to slide them down and let the wind blow through the non-air conditioned cavern.

i remember the dust that blew in off of the gravel roads, and the way it settled on the backs of the plastic-covered red bench seats.

i remember how the older kids sat in the far back seats, an area off limits to us as younger children. when the bus was nearly empty, the few of us left crept to the back to sit in the coveted spaces.

our bus driver for most of my childhood was a woman named carol. we thought carol was the best bus driver--she didn't yell at us very often, and she listened to radio stations that we liked. at some point when i was about ten, i decided we should buy her a present, and i made a secret collection to buy her a t-shirt with iron-on tranfers that read "bus 4 loves carol." i remember how proud i felt presenting that gift to her. i was sure at the time that she was surprised.

mnemonics

my friend lou ann and i were sitting backwards in the bleachers at a junior varsity volleyball game. we were cramming for a test that we had the next day, trying to learn everything we needed to know before the varsity game started. she was the athletic one who was actually playing; i was a cheerleader.

as part of our test, we were expected to know details regarding the united states cabinet, including the members and the order that the departments were created, as this apparently dictates the order of precedence and of course this is information you need to sleep well at night.

after attempting to memorize these unsuccessfully for a while, we came up with a mnemonic. it must have worked well, as i still remember both the mnemonic and the cabinet information, nearly twenty years later.

the mnemonic was "shannon takes disc jockeys in a car. lou ann hires horses to escort executives" and here was what it helped us to remember:

Shannon (State) Takes (Treasury) Disc (Defense) Jockeys (Justice) In (Interior) A (Agriculture) Car (Commerce). Lou Ann (Labor) Hires (Health & Human Services) Horses (Housing and Urban Development) To (Transportation) Escort (Energy) Executives (Education).

we would need to update it for today's cabinet, as it doesn't include the department of veterans affairs or, of course, the infamous department of homeland security.

x-ray vision

raleigh and i spent our wichita summer drooling over the small ad on the back of our archie and veronica comic book: glasses promising x-ray vision. squeezed between similar advertising for whoopee cushions and hand buzzers, the glasses were the subject of hot debate: how do they work? they can't really work, can they? wouldn't they cost a lot more? what exactly can you see? can you see through walls too? they must be a trick, but how good a trick is it for $1.50? are they worth it, or should we save for something else?

maybe not surprisingly, we never ordered them. i am sure we could have pulled together the money somehow, between the two of us, if we had really wanted to, so i can only imagine that there was a part of us that knew that it was the idea that excited us and the reality could only disappoint.

prom night

i had big hair, a black strapless dress and a nice date for my senior prom.

catholic for a day

as a senior in high school, i played a nun in our production of south pacific. i also doubled as an island girl.

drilling for oil

we lived five miles outside of conway springs, and across from our house there was a giant black oil drill. the sound of it was so constant it became white noise, and i only noticed it when we waited for the bus outside at the end of our driveway on winter mornings.

"the bus is at orth's"

school mornings were a bit frantic when i was a kid. we lived in the country, five miles outside of conway springs, and the school bus came to get us each day. i have three siblings, so the bathroom was full from at least 6:30am onward, and we fought each other for time standing over the heat vents on cold winter mornings. no matter what time we got up, we inevitably ran late.

rather than waste precious moments waiting at the end of the driveway, we took turns standing by the kitchen window, watching for the school bus. we even moved our toothbrushes and toothpaste down from the upstairs bathroom so we could brush at the kitchen sink while keeping watch. when the person on duty could see the bus through the trees, a quarter mile away at our neighbour's house, he or she yelled out to the others. it was always the same alert, screamed at top volume so the rest could hear it no matter where we were in the house: "the bus is at orth's!" this alert would trigger a response of bookbag grabbing, last-minute search for hats and mittens, and a race to the end of the drive. we had the timing down so that we usually just made it just before the bus rounded the bend.

the movie yentl

when i was twelve, we saw the movie yentl in the theatre, and i must have loved it because i bought the soundtrack. more than twenty years later, i can still remember most of the lyrics.

homemade valentines

each year when i was a kid, we sat down as a family around a dining room table covered with doilies and magazines, glitter and stickers and made each other valentines.

cruising main street

the kansas legal driving age is sixteen, and since there isn't a lot to do as a teenager, one of the most common evening past times is cruising. when i was in high school we cruised up and down main street in conway springs, a street only about four blocks long, turning u-turns at each end and honking every time we passed friends or classmates in cars going the opposite direction. i remember one night a group of friends and i slowed down and opened the door on every u-turn, creating a pyramid of aluminum cans in the street, one can at a time, as we cruised slowly back and forth over the course of the evening.