Alex has a lot of plastic animals. “‘potomos!” he says on the night before the bus. “‘potomos! ‘potomos!” he says over and over while our neighbor Annette (not her real name) sits there and pretends to not notice.
He’s looking for his hippopotamus. We don’t know where it is. We never do. “Alex, come on!” “‘potomos!” The animals are detailed down to the ruffles of the fur; some stare right back at you (a tribute, I guess, to the workers in some sweatshop in another hemisphere). Alex has a two-inch tall koala bear right from National Geographic. It would seem to stare at you as you slide it onto a pencil.
“Alex, we don’t know where the hippo is!”
I think he’s done the school bus thing about three times this year. “The school bus thing” means that when the bus rounds the corner of 5th Avenue and East 108th at 7:30 a.m. on a school day (and God knows those days are rare enough) Alex does not just slip from my hand and disappear into the bus. The “school bus thing” means something like this morning, when he recoils as the bus door opens. “Alex, you have to get on the bus!”
I’ve tried to fight it. He gets up at 20 to seven; his bus comes at 7:30. I used to take him down at 7:25, but by this part of the school year (June) I’ve figured out that if I start launching a minute too early, he has time to think about some plastic animal he wants upstairs. We’d take the elevator down to the lobby (after Alex had pushed the buttons of about five extra floors between ours and the street level) and pause there in the lobby, and then his arm would go up.
“Rhino,” he’d say. Up would come the arm. “Elevator.”
Alex you have a bus coming … Then we’d move down the sidewalk while the bus took the left turn off Fifth and we’d across E. 108th Street as the bus came to a stop. On almost every day this school year – Hurricane Sandy, the school bus strike – Alex would just climb up the steps of the bus and disappear inside. Sometimes he wouldn’t. And though his throwing his weight back against me at the bus door only usually meant a trip on the subway much like we took during the strike, it also meant a lot more.
