Growing up, my parents lived on the first floor apartment of a double-decker. The second floor was occupied by a family with a daughter my age--Takara Palinski.
Takara was a year ahead of me in school, so we rode the bus together back and forth. One morning when I was in kindergarten, I ran upstairs to get Takara so we could go to the bus stop. Her mom was pushing her out the door, and Takara was saying something that I remember roughly as
"There is a pain in my abdomen akin to that of a small calf trying to be born through my belly-button! I see a white light! I should probably stay home."
Her mother's reaction indicated that the idea of spending the day with her 7 year-old daughter was new, unpleasant, and definitely out of the question. Her response, as I recall, went something like
"I don't care if you die a slow and painful death, ebola slowly liquifying your internal organs as you wait for the school bus. LEAVE ME NOW."
She held out until after we boarded the bus; we chose the very front seat. As the bus ride continued, my sense of foreboding grew to Biblical proportions. By the time we were halfway to school, the bus was so packed that we had to squeeze over to make room for Mike Wackell, who would forever be bonded with us from that day forward.
Why do little kids always state the obvious? When Takara said "I'm throwing up now", it was probably the most unnecessary statement in history. Her jacket and mine were already covered, and Mike was bracing himself for the coming onslaught of semi-digested....well....whatever Polish people eat for breakfast. Maybe some kind of pierogi. Breakfast pierogi. The worst pierogi of them all.
At this point you may be asking yourself "Why so much detail, Cuppycake?" I'll answer your question with a question of my own: Why am I the only one who must have this burned into my brain forever? Do I really need to carry this burden alone for another 20 years?
Needless to say, the rest of the us ride was torture. I was calling out to the bus driver every, oh, I don't know, FIFTEEN SECONDS "Bus driver! Help me! Takara threw up!" As an adult, I know that the bus driver was probably in a personal hell of her own at the moment and could not hear me at the time, as she was busy reflecting on a series of poor judgment calls that landed her at that moment and location.
It appears that the driver learned her lesson, though. By the time I boarded the bus after school, I had spent so many hours reflecting on the events of the morning that I was literally green and had little wide-eyed floating heads all around me shaking their heads slowly as if to say "Stay away from this one....Bad things will be happening here soon." She skipped all the other stops and went directly to my house, where I promptly exited the bus, walked three steps down the road, and threw up right on the yellow line. No pierogies, though.
That story never gets old.
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