September 12, 2005 - Monday
Harry's bus arrived a couple of minutes late today. I didn't think anything of it at the time other than that we'd have to leave immediately to get Jeremy from school by 4:00, so I hustled Harry into the car and put his backpack in the rear. As we were driving Harry pointed out that we were going the same way as his bus and I agreed. Harry described the bus's morning and afternoon route to me last week, so I think I have a good idea of how it goes. I noted that while it was the same road, we were actually traveling in the opposite direction as the bus and we had a nice little conversation about the concept of "opposite" until Harry said, "and that's the skid mark that my bus made," referring to two distinct and parallel, rubber-black "J" marks near the top of a long hill.

Now, Harry was sitting there next to me in the car and had no blood on him, nor had he done anything different than usual running off the bus to hug me three moments before, so I was fairly confident that nothing too serious had happened. But, there was this very dark skid mark. Probably not surprisingly, the rest of the way to school was dominated by my trying to figure out what had happened.

The thing about these types of conversations, when a parent really wants to learn something from a child, is to lead as little as possible. Too many suggestive questions can simply have the child agreeing with possible scenarios, while no leading at all will cause the conservation to just stop. The trick is not only the getting of information, but knowing whether what information you get is really fact.

My best guess as to what happened is that a girl got up from her seat because her stop was next, coming up at the bottom of the large hill. As she started moving toward the front of the bus she somehow tripped, perhaps on someone's knee or foot (Harry insists it was an accident, but we all remember about life on the bus) and apparently cut her forehead. Blood ran out across her forehead, she screamed, and the "bus stopped with a lurch," according to Harry.
"Did you fall forward? Did you hit your head on the seat in from of you?" I asked.
"Just a little. I put up my hand and that stopped me. I hit my head just a little. Just my hair hit the seat."
I guess from there the bus moved on to the girls stop and she just got off and things went back to normal. Still it certainly sounds tenuous.

[As I've looked again at this skid for a couple of days I've decided that the parallel skids are too close together to be from the bus and are probably from teenage kids fooling around in cars. (There are plenty of other skid marks on the nearby streets.) I now suspect that the bus probably did "stop with a lurch," but probably not so fast as to make such bold skid marks, and particularly not fast enough to make a skid mark that trails across the street and ends in a "J."]


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