Once, when I was looking through old letters from my mother, I recalled a story she used to tell me from time to time.
I was my parents’ only son. My mother married late in life, and the doctors forbade her from having a child. She didn’t listen to their advice, however. I turned out to be a very welcome addition to the family; my grandparents, my father and even my stepsister all adored me, whilst my mother, too, naturally doted on her only son.
My mother started work very early in the morning, but before this she had to take me to kindergarten. To make sure she wasn’t late, we would always travel on the very first bus of the day. It was always the same person driving it. We’d get off the bus at our stop and my mother would take me up to the gates, hand me over to the teacher there, and then run back to the stop and wait for the next bus.
After several instances when she turned up late to work, she was warned that she could be fired. Like everyone else at that time, we lived very modestly; there was no way we could have survived just on my father’s wages. So my mother very reluctantly took the decision to let me — a three-year-old boy — make my way from the bus stop alone, on the understanding that I’d be able to reach the kindergarten gates without her help.
Everything went according to plan right from the first time we did it, although those seconds when I was walking alone were the longest and most terrifying of my mother’s life. She would scramble along the isle of the half-empty bus to the window, checking whether I’d made it to the gates or whether I was still shuffling along in my heavy winter coat.
After a while, she suddenly began to notice that the bus driver had started to pull away from the stop more slowly, and would accelerate only when I was safely through the gates. This continued for the whole time I attended kindergarten. My mother didn’t try to find out why the driver had begun to do this — she was too distracted by the need to make sure I was safe.
It all became clear later, when I started going to school. One day the driver greeted me by saying, ’Hi there, little boy! You look so grown up now! Do you remember when I used to take you and your mother to kindergarten…?’
Many years have passed since then. But every time I go past that bus stop, I recall that period of my early childhood, and I feel a bit warmer inside thinking about that driver who carried out that little act of kindness every single day by delaying her bus for a moment — all for the sake of a stranger’s piece of mind.
Author: Semyon Semyonych
