The Number 8 Bus to Bethlehem

I write of this as if it happened every year, when perhaps it only happened twice.  Such is the nature of memory.  What matters is that it stands out as one of the brightest moments of childhood, one that shaped me in ways that I could never have imagined at the time.

Which is to say — now — to those of us who feel too busy for such “inefficiencies” as sitting on a city bus with a ten-year-old child, these things matter.  More than anything.

My maternal grandmother lived in a working class neighborhood on a street of second generation Italians, Irish, Polish and German families. They were fiercely proud of their postage stamp front yards and the rear gardens they tended with passionate ferocity and competitive zeal.  Each family had one car, one television set, and one coffee maker — the latter percolating all day long in anticipation of whoever happened to drop by.  For shopping trips downtown, they took the bus.

At the start of the holiday season the year I was 10, I was allowed to stay overnight at my grandmother’s house – always a delicious treat.  I slept in my mother’s childhood bedroom, and lay awake for long hours playing with the tiny animal figurines perched on a small vitrine over her bed.   After breakfast, my grandmother and I walked the length of her street, stopping at many porches for her to show me off to the neighbors (my grandmother was an incurable extrovert).  Sometimes on these walks, we’d dropped into her church to light a candle, as memory tells me we did that day.  Then we arrived at a desolate street corner to await the local spur that would transfer us to Main Street, where the Number 8 would carry us, block by block, stop by stop, to the kingdom of garlanded and wreathed departments stores downtown.

My grandmother’s downtown was its own world – a foreign country to me, as distant as the North Pole from my father’s nearby law offices, or my mother’s chic suburban malls.  My grandmother’s downtown at Christmas time was a few densely concentrated blocks of magically festooned old-world department stores, Salvation Army Santas and bells, a Woolworth’s counter steaming with bowls of soup and mugs of coffee, and the twinkling tea room where she treated me to lunch, a swirl of ladies and club sandwiches and small crystal bowls full of pudding for dessert.

My grandmother ushered me with an aplomb of a denizen, a familiar, into her secret world of dazzle and delight.  We peered into bedding departments, and trolled the cosmetic aisles.  We sniffed and squeezed, but mainly, we just looked.  And I see now as an adult, I was glimpsing a world of her own longings.  I was her ambassador, her enchanted companion, innocent of class distinctions, as we strolled the ground floor of the shops she would never have entered alone, there to finger hand-dyed kid gloves, French stockings, cashmere scarves and leather purses from Italy.

That day, I had my allowance, and a list:  gifts for each of my five siblings.  With skill, and incredible energy, my grandmother helped me evaluate the baby doll swing, the board game, the Tonka truck.  By the end of the afternoon, we had amassed several bags filled with my personal Santa’s sleigh.  I could not have felt more grown up, or prouder, and my beloved grandmother was sure, based on my purchasing acumen, that I was one day destined to be — her highest praise — President of the United States.  We should all have grandmothers like her.

If memories could be hung on the tree, this would go up there with the angel that sits atop my own these many years later.

Looking back, however, it wasn’t the dazzle and the magic that was the most precious gift she gave me on those trips downtown.  It was her fascination for the people who got on and off the bus.  Coming and going, we watched as at the many stops, the doors opened, and travelers came aboard.  My grandmother wondered about each of them, their stories, their circumstances, and I caught her energy, and her hunger for connection.  As the bus moved closer to the city center, I saw people I did not see in my middle-class white suburb.  There were women in uniforms, men barely warm enough to stand at the bus stop, Native Americans hovering beside piles of bittersweet they sold for holiday decoration.  I glimpsed stories that blew open my little girl’s world, and utterly changed my heart and my sense of place.  A larger, and more uncertain, but also more beautifully real world opened out somewhere past my street, with its benign evening kickball games, where unaccompanied children walked to school each day, rode their bikes to visit friends, were safe in other homes for sleepovers.  My grandmother gave me the world, and a deep love of the stranger who got on the bus.  And the result was that I would always want more time on busses, in out-of-the-way side streets that never got enough sunlight, in places with insufficient hope.

I’m not sure what those many seekers of tradition were looking for centuries ago in the Holy Land, but their numbers never abated — prophets, sinners, seers.  At this time of year, we tell one another that they were seeking Bethlehem — our sign for the deeper reality and possibility of existence.

What about me?  Did I become a seeker as a result of those bus rides?  I think that the answer is yes.  Had I not had my grandmother as guide I might have remained a sight-seer to the struggles and striving, diligence and longing that so easily escapes awareness when life is comfortable (or we are ourselves struggling to make it so).  I would not have become a gatherer of stories, I suspect, without her.  And I would never have known the bravery of a widow living on very modest means who wanted to give her granddaughter the entire world, if she could have, and who unbeknownst to her found a way to do so, on the Number 8 bus downtown.

 

Image thanks to Dreamstime.com