I wait in the road for the preschoolers, never on the sidewalk. I meet the arrivals right on the blacktop, buses bubbling over the hill like rust. Rust. My English-teacher son would prefer something different, something about sunrises no doubt, but rust fits. Old. Historic. Real before you existed and still working. The wait is cold and I should have worn a heavy coat. The leather one. The one I wear on the motorcycle for day-long rides, but the Principal would squirm into my ear about parents, about image, about all the crap that administrators crap out of their mouths. The kind of crap that doesn’t fertilize or help anyone grow. The first bus pulls up and stops at my feet, brakes like banshees, and the children sit so small you can barely see their heads in the windows, just fuzzy pink earflaps or pom-poms perched on hats. No one else volunteers for this, for chaperoning the kids on this walk from bus to front door. This is my final month, so why not me? Forced into early retirement for being expensive. Thirty years in and I’m union. I’m benefits. I’m gray, resistant to change, hanging on, or some other empty gloss. So hit the road and thanks for your life. But you know what? Screw the high road. All that talk about team, family, yet the rest of the ranks stay plopped in the lounge, young and bitching their bitch over drive-through coffee. I’ll do this alone, wait on 4 and 5-year-olds still scared to travel from one tall door to another, just plucked from their plush beds and dropped into the worldflow, which is something I understand. If they are mice then the hawk’s opportunity is now. We have to cross the road to get to the school. There’s a guard, Alice, nice lady, a warrior in orange reflectors, but she’s about 70 and can barely hold up her battleaxe of a stop sign, so it’s me, 20 kids, and the crosswalk. We huddle. I don’t wear gloves, so I hold out my hand to the baby nearest my leg. She’s bundled in a blue coat, the kind with fake fur around the hood, and she grabs my arm with both hands as if drowning, so I lean down and whisper “together” and she calms enough to release one of her hands from mine, which finds its way into another child’s, and that hand into another, into another, until we are one. A regiment. Unafraid, we cross the road. We do not stop. We do not yield. The other teachers stand in the lounge, complicit and standardized, glancing out of the window, trading nervous looks. We reach the steps. We are courage. In just a few moments, solidarity will march through the doors and retake our school.
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