Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-10-31 - 10:39 a.m.

Mama Lied

This morning I went to the Halloween Parade at the elementary school, to watch several hundred children in costume march around in a big circle to "The Bridge On the River Kwai" and swat at the late-season irritable yellowjackets. And while I was watching the parade, my car got hit by a bus.

I'm not kidding. A big ol Laidlaw Transit yellow schoolbus just wiped half my bumper off. No kids in it, no one hurt, although the driver wept her contacts out of her eyes over her four-year safety record; just a slightly sad Colt with a missing bumper, broken taillights and an ugly crumpled fender. But I am REALLY pissed off.

That policeman didn't even ASK to see my underwear.

Now, that sucks. How many chances in my life am I going to have to get hit by a bus? And out of those chances, what are the odds that I will have stepped out of the shower just a half-hour before, and put on clean underwear?

If she had hit me an hour or so earlier, I would have been in my pajamas. I always take the kids to school in my pajamas, and I always think, "You idiot, someday you are going to be in accident and you will be talking to this city's finest in your bathrobe." But I do it anyway.

Today would have been the only day in the year I could have wandered around the streets in my bathrobe and pretended it was just a Halloween costume. "HA! I'm all dressed up as TrashMama! I NEVER look like this!" But I didn't get to do that; I was fully dressed and in my bus-ready underwear, and damnit, Mama lied. You do NOT need clean underwear to get hit by a bus.

It is not a bad idea, however, to carry a thermos full of espresso with you at all times, for the possibility that you will someday come back and find your car parked in by a large yellow schoolbus adorned with half your bumper and occupied by a weeping young bus driver, and you will have to wait a long time for police and supervisors and all manner of official people to come with cameras and forms and copy everything off many documents onto many other documents and pass them to each other for a half-hour.

I hugged the bus driver when I left. Told her my neck didn't hurt at all. Got her to smile.

But I'm mad at my mother about that underwear bullshit.

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