SPOILIN’ THE BROTH
Neighbor Grover sez the best cure for an obsession is to get another one.
Grandson Esten Cooke, 18, a Rotary foreign exchange student in Germany, writes a monthly report back to the Fredericksburg Rotary Club, which sponsored him. This is a recent one.
Everyday I take the bus from my home in Vadersdorf to the Inselschule in Burg, about a 30-minute drive. I listened to music with my headphones until they broke, so I resorted to people watching to pass the time.
There is a small kid on my bus. He couldn’t be older than 5 or 6. The first time I saw him, he was waiting with his mother at the Vadersdorf bus stop. When the doors opened, his mother waved goodbye and he screamed and cried. He held onto his mother’s leg sobbing until the driver closed the door and moved on without him.
And I totally get it. It’s scary to leave your parents, or your home, and to get on the bus. The bus drivers will not coddle you, they got places to be. And the other kids by no means make the bus an inviting place. They put their bags in empty seats so other people can’t use them. Then you have to stand, surviving the road’s shakes and turns.
The second time his mom got on the bus and rode with him to school. From this point on, it was a clash of wills between a mom trying to teach her child independence and a kid who was terrified of that thought. Sometimes she would ride with him, other times his father, sometimes she would ask another kid on the bus to look after him, and some days I didn’t see him on the bus at all.
Eventually came the moment of truth. One day I saw him get on the bus by himself. He stood there in the isle and I could tell it sucked. He was so afraid of everything! Of the other kids and the bus driver and how the bus’s turbulence would make him fall down. This whole scene kept happening for weeks.
Slowly, so slowly you could only see it happening if you watched for weeks, he got better at handling it, the isolation, the fear. But it wasn’t as if one day he just suddenly became better at handling it. His resistance was built out of enduring everyday. Sometimes he got a bus seat, other times he had to stand and sometimes he fell down.
One cold day, I was standing in the isle, like all of the others, waiting for a kid to leave the bus so I could snatch his seat. It’s a dog-eat-dog world on the bus, and you gotta’ do what you gotta’ do to survive. Then I felt a tap on my leg.
I turned around and it was the little kid, whose months-long journey I had witnessed out of boredom. He looked at me and said “Can you move please?” (But in German), and proceeded to push his way past me, so he could to get to some of his friends who were waiting for him further up the isle.
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