The Summer Before Kindergarten. Loosely in the Style of Gertrude Stein

Bus Stop

This is the big time now, we must become adults now, he and I, less he than I for like him I have been for some time now a child again. But this is the big time, getting up and getting going, going to someplace where they will not wait, to the bus stop of the school bus where the system says you shall be there and the system will not wait because that is the system’s weight. No more waiting, you shall be there, five hundred thousand others are at the bus stops and who are we that they should wait for us when we have failed to get there? Not like preschool these morning times that are coming, not like yarn shops, no napping Irish Setters no ladies counting skeins when you come on rainy days to browse and think of lovely colors. I forgot your inside shoes once and went home to get them, I forgot your lunch bag once and went home to get it, and in minutes I swung along this happy link between your bright room and ours.

Driving to Camp

Driving to camp, not your first camp but your second camp, not the close by one but the far away camp. At one end of this road is a house it is our house, with some books and furniture and lamps that in the morning pull the corners towards the middle of the house, and at the other end is another house, a different house, with three Chinese ladies and no lamps but ceiling lights and dirty walls like dirty walls in China but installed in this other house which is where the road has its other end. There is a lady there and two girls and one of them is beautiful, taller than she should be, so tall there is nothing else besides a perfect face, a face so perfect I wonder why no one has taken it why it is in this one single house on one single street at the road’s other end. 

Talking on the Road

The future is in this fact that because we drive we also talk, unless we listen to Lady Gaga. Because after the driving you will be gone, with these women or those women or any other women who are the women who teach you, as I taught you five years running until we turned you over for the days and pull the line in slowly only in the afternoons again, not too fast again, too many questions makes you drop the hook again, but slowly, until you follow the thread again and tell us of the day and drop your stories one by one into the bucket that sits where we used to spend our time together.

South Side North Side

You ask why we are driving and why the driving is to the North Side from the South Side and not the South Side from the North Side. The North Side has the yarn shops and the bakeries and the Lego Store and the Chinese camp with its beautiful girl and the mezuzah on the door of the house at the end of the road, and the South Side does not have these. Because once upon a time South Side people moved to the North Side is what Mama said and you ask me why and I say because once upon a time new people moved to the South Side and the old people didn’t want to share. Share what you say their neighborhood I say why you say because the old people refused to live beside the new people I say why you say because the new people were black I say. I don’t mind it, you say. I am happy to hear that for a while but it doesn’t change the driving and it is still all very complicated.