“Billy Manas’s dog got hit by a car!”
Then, what I heard was the sound of an old diesel motor fighting for its life. I felt the bumps and potholes. I saw the speed blurry trees out the window.
“Billy Manas’s dog got hit by a car!”
Again, 20 more yards.
“Billy Manas’s dog got hit by a car!”
I was incredulous. I mean, as incredulous as a 6 year old can possibly be. I was not really a social scientist in those days, but I still knew that this horrible little girl wasn’t paying the slightest attention to how sad all of this was making me. She was far too preoccupied getting the news to those ears first. No one was going to scoop her.
Everyone needs to feel significant, I thought to myself, but for the love of Christ, maybe find something a little less harmful to the people around you (that’d be me, btw).
It was approximately ten minutes since our family’s miniature schnauzer was struck and killed by a car and my mother deposited me on the school bus because, well, as most people realize, that’s how parents rolled in the seventies.
That left me with the unexpected task of finding my way through the dark forest of a six year old's emotional overwhelm. Strangely, if this little girl who I never met before wasn’t sitting in the first row, shouting those eight words every time the bus door opened, I might have been too young to really understand what was happening. But, obviously, hearing something that heinous so many times, I lost the opportunity to just not think about it.
“Billy Manas’s dog got hit by a car!”
She kept ejaculating this phrase with the sort of enthusiasm most people reserve for surprise parties. Which was strangely appropriate because it was only the second week of classes in September and she was wearing this checkered party dress. She looked like she was going to a surprise party.
As she managed to blurt this phrase a couple dozen more times, tears began to run down my cheeks.
“Whiskey…,” I tried to wrap my head around the reality.
“Was he gone forever?”
That dog was a part of our family before I was. Not to mention, at six years old, I, like most kids, haven't constructed that cynical anthro-centric hierarchy that most people invariably adopt: human life is greater and more important than animal life.
Nope, to me, it felt the same as if one of my brothers got hit by a car.
Now, at this point, you are probably wondering, “What was the bus driver doing whenever the air brakes were set and the door opened? Didn’t he get tired of hearing that sentence over and over again?”
Apparently, not.
It bears repeating: this was the seventies. No seatbelts, no bike helmets and no accountability. We now live in a world where poor decisions, like the bus driver’s in this story, can get a person fired. Truthfully, I don’t have a problem with that. For any adult person to be in the presence of such an absurd scene without even suggesting to Little Miss Muffitt to go back to her seat and zip her lip, is a person who is either completely in another world or, worse, incapable of empathy. Neither of those characteristics makes a person qualified to be watching over the life of children–not even for a few minutes.
I really don’t blame the little girl too much. She was 6 years old. Every middle aged person I know who rushes to Facebook to post “RIP Chris Cornell” or “RIP Takeoff” before anyone else has heard the tragedy are nothing more than little Christines four decades later.
We can all agree that celebrities don’t care what you post on social media, yes? I mean especially that they are now dead. I could picture the whole thing: I hung myself and now I am living in a very murky place called purgatory. I wasn’t sure how to proceed until I saw that post from Brandon Mularky–rest in peace. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but now I’ve been furnished with direction.
People really aren’t as dumb as that. Hard to believe, yes, but they aren’t wishing Chris Cornell or Takeoff a restful afterlife.
They were just trying to find a less obv way of shouting:
“Billy Manas’s dog got hit by a car!”
Oh the seventies, it's a wonder any of us survived them! The loss of a furry family member is harder to reckon with than the less furry ones...unconditional love, judgement free (as far as we can tell anyway)
This made me sad, I agree, she was also six, but that bus driver should have told her to stop. Now I am going to feel sad. All life is precious, and pets are family. And words matter. I hope Christine grew out of that phase.