Life. Perform Ramdom Acts of Hamlet

Summer is spinning itself away and I am sad. The downward slide toward school has for me always been paved with tragedy. Can you pave with tragedy? Even in print? Tragedy pavers are slick with regrets and slimy with second guessing. No way even to slow a descent. How could all those days my child self piled up at summer's beginning, heaping them high with careless, spendthrift gluttony, slipping them through my fingers like marbles in a bowl, like polished stones, have gone? Just gone, gone all away? Did I do the things I planned? Heck, I forgot to plan. Again. Second half of summer dread, heavy now every day in my stomach. Was there time now to frantically plan, make a list, check it twice, ensure a harvest by summer's end so I could store up something, anything, tangible to carry about and tell over through the dark days of schooling, this, this I had in summer, events and activities to remember, to remind me of the untellable worth of an unscheduled day? Or should I take arms, empty myself of things and people, dig in my nails and drag my feet for all my worth against the sun's shortening hours, refuse to observe, build a wall of books so high that from behind it I couldn't even tell that each successive bedtime was darker, quieter, seducing me into winter sleep, less and less like a strange summer afternoon nap. Riding my bike in the cool blue twilight swallowing hard at rising panic. One more day gone. One more day gone.
I still feel it.


Not too long ago, I rode a school bus, as I did every day from third grade through graduation. I might reasonably have expected never to do it again, but I have these children. The youngest needed an adult presence on bus rides from time to time. I am that sort of parent who becomes an adult presence if anyone asks it of me.

It makes me kind of sick to ride school buses. There's the general, slight carsickness to which I am prone if I sit toward the back or in direct sun (I sound like a houseplant), but then there's a specific bus sickness, more of the soul than of the stomach or the head. I can't tune out now that I am an a grown up, I can't help watching the children around me; they intrude insistently, they sling words callously into my ears. I begin to brood. I know a bus brings out the best in nobody, but I find myself wondering, could this perhaps the worst? And I know it's not, not the worst, this is a group of lucky, achieving children who are on their way to a privilege, something they and their dedicated parents have earned. Which funnels me straight into musing on what sort of careful, thoughtful upbringing could result in the greedy, stentorian, attention-devouring, criminally silly behavior manifesting the instant a little person's bottom touches that terrible vinyl. Is it the shape of the seat? Is it that bus smell of old lunches, dirty grade schoolers, desperately ignored and stomped-down homework with a throw-up chaser? Is this how my own children act on a bus, or would act, were I not eternally manifesting as Adult Presence? Is it even possible to raise a well mannered child who will not simply lose all sense of dignity, of propriety and decorum, all sense, the moment they feel the throbbing of the great diesel engines thrumming up through the floor, making conversation carried on at any level below a shriek ridiculous and impossible? And so on and on, swirling thoughts in ever tightening circles of hysterical supposing and hopeless concluding. Before I can stop myself I'm thinking despairingly about the relative insignificance of all lives and efforts and my life and efforts in particular. The longer the ride, the grimmer my musings and bleaker my conclusions.


I try to avoid it, bus riding. But so do all the other parents on the planet and some of us have to form a presence, so I find I go every time I'm asked. And I ponder.


All the kids in Kanosh rode the bus to school in Fillmore. The bus, beginning its run heading north, stopping for kids about every third corner, made a circle through the town, which is four blocks wide running east to west and five blocks long running north to south. Eight blocks to the mile. My stop was about halfway along the circle and something like a third of a block from my front door. That door faced the wrong direction for bus watching, opening as it did to a lovely view of the east mountains, while the bus turned the corner down by my Grandma Christensen's house and came at us from the west (the direction of the desert and the nastiest winds), up the block, across main street and then another block to the corner where it turned by my Harris grandmother's house, where we got on. If someone, maybe a little sister, was actually stationed in the front yard watching, she could see the bus two blocks away and scream to the house that it was coming, giving the older and slower people inside plenty of time to grab their stuff and get to the corner. In the spring and fall sisters sometimes did that. My mother sometimes made them. In the winter they were not inclined to be helpful in that way. My mother still sometimes made them because she didn't want to drive us the 15 or so miles from Kanosh to Fillmore, which is what might happen if we missed the bus.


But not often. Usually if we failed to make the stop before the bus pulled away (one of the drivers got a real kick out of watching kids run all the way to their stop and then pulling away at the last second. I almost ran into the bus during one of these little pranks. My dad would watch these goings on and, I swear, flames would come out of the top of his head. Equally mad at us and the driver) our dad or mom would throw us into the car and go screaming along the county road to pull off and sit waiting at either the turnoff to the Indian Reservation or the road out to Hatton, catching the bus as it came back from round trips harvesting children at these locales, and make us get on there. You could see the bright yellow, capsule-shaped bus very clearly as it hurtled along the flat, empty, open road in the early, raking light from the rising sun, going east out to the reservation or west to Hatton, (or coming back, depending on how late we were) so it was easy to know where to wait. We didn't like this option, though it saved time for our parents. You had the annoyed, put-out parent thrusting you none too gently from the family car (which had been parked in a geographically aggressive position across the highway access to prevent the bus from just speeding around you--this generally worked) into the care of the frankly pissed-off driver, now doubly inconvenienced and making an "unscheduled" stop. And then, of course, there were the other kids. Stepping onto the bus, into a solid wave of aggressive clamor, now all turned to ridicule, now all focused on the bus-missers, was a hideous form of social destruction. Better from a child's viewpoint to just idle and dither till you forced a ride all the way to Fillmore and could slide silently and anonymously into the crowds pouring into school. Only your parent was mad at you, had been before, would be again anyway. At least your parents mostly loved you.


And going with Mom or Dad was quicker. By about forty minutes. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes to drive from Kanosh to Fillmore, depending on speed and road conditions. Weather, for example, is often a factor; delineator poles keep you on the asphalt if you are making the drive after a big snow fall but ahead of the plows. Cowboys moving a herd of cattle along the road between Meadow and Kanosh can also really slow you down. Our regular bus ride, with fair weather and no livestock but with our trips out to the reservation and Hatton, was an hour. Each way.

I remember the bus rides almost as solid things, a dense cylindrical tube packed with pounding, unending, stupid noise and bad air, stretching from my stop to the schoolyard , and me, suspended in it, the proverbial fly in amber, entering at one end and exiting at the other without a sense of intermediate movement, of travel. I read, mostly, unless I was too cold or in the direct sun (houseplant). I liked to sit in the seat over the heater, even though you boiled and lots of the kids avoided those seats. I hated getting to school with numb feet. I hated my hands shaking and not being able to hold my book still enough to focus on it. Better to burn.


I remember riding for the whole way, sometimes, leaning my head against the window, bumping and slamming against the glass for an hour. Getting a headache from it, a bruise, not knowing why I had done it the whole way. Not seeming to feel like it made any difference.


I remember hating the kids when they were on the bus, hating the way they looked and sounded, the way they shed their normal inhibitions and their occasional manners in the wind screaming through the open windows. They'd open the windows, sometimes, in the afternoons when it had become warm or even hot but the heaters were still going full blast from the cold morning, and a window would stick and still be stuck down in the morning when it was freezing and the driver would say that's what we got. For what we did.
I remember that to get your head slammed against the window by a bigger kid walking past was called a comic strip.
To be slapped on the side of your head as someone went by was a cuff, a new word to me when I was ten.


I remember we hated it so much when our elementary school bus had to take the high school kids home; they hurt us, comic strips all the way down the aisle.
I remember getting on the bus with little kids after I was the one in high school, seeing apprehension on their faces, realizing my advanced age, wondering if we were hurting them, as we had been hurt. Watching and being relieved that, no, we were ignoring them.


I remember the smothered, trapped feeling of being in the bus with a fist fight. The way the fighters spilled from their own seats, lurched into the rows around them. Kids scrambling to get out of the way, getting smashed, getting pinched between fighters and metal seats, separated from friends and siblings, stranded and crawling under seats, getting punched sometimes when they were in the way, losing homework lunches show-and-tell prized possessions in the mud and gritty black ice water on the floor. Not being able to get out of the way. Not having anywhere to get to.


I thought, at the start of this writing, that these would be some funny stories coming on, writing about riding on the bus. I thought I'd be silly and self-deprecating and make at least myself laugh, remembering.
I've done my best.


In California I had walked across the street to my school.
There's a great school building in Kanosh.
Busing to Fillmore began the year my family moved to town. I was eight.
School in Fillmore was going to be so much better for us all, more opportunities if we were all together.
It would get everyone ready to play on the same team in high school, cut out the small town allegiances.
The people who decide knew it would be so much better for the kids. Fillmore would have so much more to offer. There was tax money for the getting.
How much could you offer me in return for two hours of every school day of my life from third grade through twelfth? How much for a ride that left me sanded and stripped, rubbed raw, tumbled and jagged hoping only my house would be empty when I got there so I could hide from my sisters, hide from my chores, hide my homework, hide from being oldest and in charge while my mom was at work, bury myself for an hour or two in silence till I felt alive and ok again? How can any adult be sure of values, making a trade like that?


What would you give me in return for my time, the hours of my life?
How much, really, has Fillmore got?


I sat on a bus for a while recently on the way to someplace special and important, watching the kids no one wanted to sit with, the others crammed four to a seat, listening to the peculiar wall of bus noise, frantic and unyielding, smelling the smell, watching from the edge of the yawning pit of bottomless silliness, thinking about how I have tried so hard to offer my children what I think is best.


My children have taken piano lessons and dance. Special reading programs at the library, swimming lessons. We drove them to Lehman's Caves and to the sand dunes and the beach. Endless museums of artistic, historic and cultural interest. Karate, tumbling, 4-H. Cheer and rodeos (did you know tiny children ride sheep?). Ballroom. Art classes. Magic and singing and juggling. Dance and dance and more dance--two-day-long dance competitions. Volleyball, t ball, softball. Peer suicide and crime prevention retreats and leadership councils because my kids were outstanding. That's what people said. These opportunities were going to be so good for them. They have hosted leadership meets and taught acting workshops and run youth courts. Theater at home and across the state since they were tiny. National and state competitions. School plays and school teams. Choir. Band.

I made an acting company for them.
They liked it.
At the time they liked fabulous dress-ups at least as well.
Flour in ziploc bags, the handcart and batteries for flashlights.

Yes, we took them to see Hamlet in Stratford, and yes, that was nice but they remember better that to get the tickets we all slept (or whatever) on the bricks you see in this picture and that after we got the tickets we roamed almost aimlessly, certainly without a plan, through a long summer day filled with serendipitous deliciousness, following Tom's vague, pleasant mission memories, waiting for our show to start.

Tudor warehouses on a silent river. The tiny lady in Glouchester cathedral, no taller that Leah herself, who leaned toward Zoe and Leah whispering, "Do you like Harry Potter?" and whisked them away for more than an hour who-knows-where to show them the secrets of Hogwarts-in-a-movie. Nearly strolling past the Tailor of Glouchester's house but recognizing it from its portrait. Mulberries and blackberries sweet and dark and staining. A stumbled-upon concert, the King's Singers warming up in Tewkesbury cathedral with only ourselves for an audience. Zoe turning to us triumphant, flushed and defiant after meeting them, talking to them. Zoe, a serious young singer, having just watched them work, listened to them build their sound, reminding us she had been denied a coveted spot in the school choir because she was going to be gone over the summer and would miss a two day workshop. "That workshop is going on right now. Right now." Zoe, smiling like a cat, walking dreamily away to eat mulberries.


This is Noah and Leah and Zoe. We are hiking mount Snowdon. Eden has come up part way and decided that was far enough. She and the painter have gone down. Can you see that the wind is rising, clouds forming, a storm coming? Can you see how they are dressed? After more hiking, when Noah can no longer feel his legs from cold, we will decide to go down. Zoe and her dad will go on to the top with a few other students. Turning back will be as hard as the hardest things Noah ever does. But he can't feel his legs. And there is Leah. And there is the storm. After everyone is down we will say, when we talk about it, that all the decisions were good. This will be because no one died. We have talked about that hike and those decisions ever since. Maybe we always will.

That summer the girls missed camp (again). Their mothers felt, not guilt, not really, but a small uncomfortable thing not unlike guilt about that missing. Some evenings in our funny Cardiff living room as that summer wore away we added it all up to reassure ourselves of the trade we had made on our young girls' behalf. On the one hand: their travel in three countries, three capitols, their living away from us with six college students, budgeting, planning, shopping in another culture and another currency, cooking in their turn, learning to bake bread, do their own laundry, street contacting with missionaries, volunteering in Primary, negotiating Cardiff without parents, stomping off downtown to pay their bill and get their power turned back on; on the other hand, a week of camp. Eden's camp leader said to me, loving but obviously worried, "It's not that we don't understand you want to travel, of course we do and we think it's great, it's just that we worry she'll miss these great memories."


They fly in planes and ride in trains on other continents and from end to end of this one.
They also need to be left alone.
Have I ignored them enough?
I rode a bus, too, every day of my year that wasn't my beloved summer break.
It was going to be what was best for me.
We haven't been to a rodeo in a while. They don't have them just everywhere, you know, and I've been talking it up, I miss it. Leah informs me she has no memory of rodeo other than that she got a Sprite at one. I am horrified. ("That's it?" and " I bought you a Sprite?") We go, she loves it. We try to plan our 24th celebration. She asks if there are any more rodeos. I pause. Are you sure? Don't try to please me. This is your summer.

When we moved to Kanosh I schooled them at home to avoid that bus ride.
For the first time since I was eight I enjoyed the turn from summer to fall.
But we were driven to discover books on tape because somehow we still lived in our car.
Everything, everything was in Fillmore by then, because it was so much better that way.
Now we have moved and my youngest went to a great school with everything I could want her to have in a great school and we are only a few blocks away. I walked with her to school every day, so she wouldn't feel so only.
This year she will go to middle school and I'm bunched up about that like I haven't been in a long time. She could ride her bike, I guess, part of the year, but it's really a bit far to walk.
My run to the bus stop was not nearly as far as our walk to the new school.


I think about it all the time, I try so hard because I am just so scared and unsure. I second guess every offer, checking whether whatever it is I hold out to children, demanding obedience or offering a trade instead of simply letting them master an hour of their own dear time playing, is worth it. Really worth it. One more day gone. One more day.


Take for instance my acting company. Here's me. "Come do Hamlet with me. Just three or four (ok, maybe five) hours a week for months."
Worth even those hours lost lying on their backs staring vacantly at the sky?


"I'll teach you a little bit about the culture of the sword.

I'll show you Shakespeare's words til they feel like your own."
Worth even an hour drawing, doodling on the backs of their hands?


"I'm here with you. All the way. If you need me, I'm on stage with you. This is the biggest hut, the best pretend, anyone can ever build. It's another time, another place. I promise, it'll be worth it. I'll make it worth it."
Me, talking, when they could be poking ants.

I watch the summer days and no matter how mindfully I live they shorten and shorten. One more day, gone.

Whatever trip I offer, it had better be worth the bus ride.


Photos: Hamlet, KAC, 2006
2008 BYU study abroad, Wales
Noah's photos