The 34th Street Crosstown Magic Bus, NYC

One recent Wednesday was a rainy and melancholy day. Melancholy because it is May and it was raining, and raining, raining endlessly all May. It was a day of unsmiling New Yorkers who, like me, have brains soaked in the fog that settled on us since days before, who crave the sun, and who share space–wet, soggy space–with just too many people.  A day of work–work that did not change the world!–added more gray, cold rainwater to the half-empty cup. My dreams the night before were infused with confusion and opacity that must have crept–no, not like Eliot’s little feet–they leaped, they pounced, and they were not light on the toes–from the moisture and clouds and raging wind and rain outside the window, into my brain.  There, they did the classic Jungian wonder–these dreams featured people I know disguised as others, there was the classic work piled in folders not able to be found, deadlines not able to be met! And little babies…perfectly normal ones, who were learning how to speak, while I–well those who know me know this well–do not have experience in this sort of thing.

A fine way to find myself mid week.  Full of a sort of low-clouds-hanging (to continue the bad weather metaphor), speechless kind of sadness, and still confusion from the strange dreams, I decided after work to treat myself to the 34th Street crosstown bus, starting on 9th Avenue.  I take the bus only when it’s rainy, or icy or snowy, or I am just too tired to make the long trek to Grand Central through throngs of midtown tourists and office workers.  Usually the 34th Street crosstown is practically empty all the way west, so it’s a quiet pleasure until you get farther east. But today….it was packed. So crowded, every single seat was taken, and the aisles were completely filled. But there was something apparent, immediately, that this bus was different. It was crowded with young school children, all sitting on almost every seat available, as if it were a private school bus. In all my three decades as a New Yorker, I’ve never seen a public city bus filled like this with kids. The noise was happy and rambunctious, full of carefree energy. Some of the other passengers had little smiles on their faces. They were not annoyed by having to stand, or by the noise. It was as if we were a part of this field trip.

Because of my life experience as a mother, I, like all of us in this kind of other-worldly motherhood that we’re never prepared for, have this uncanny ability to immediately absorb and divine a disability in another child, even if it is barely noticeable to the public eye. It can be the slightest, most minuscule difference–a gait in a walk, a set of the mouth, a turn of the head, an expression. I, like other mothers like me, can even do this from peripheral vision, or sometimes even from the back of my head, even from hearing without seeing the child, or just sensing something.  And it will happen in a nanosecond.

So in the nanosecond that I paid my fare, I realized immediately that this bus was almost entirely filled with special needs young kids. Hearing impaired, completely hearing impaired, developmentally disabled in ways not completely assessable but evident from manner of voice, behavior…and many trisomy 21 children, mostly boys, of different ages, from a little one, maybe 6 years old, to an older one of about 13.  Every one of these children were laughing and smiling. They all had programs from “The Lion King”, and oh how excited they were!  Grabbing each others programs, pointing, commenting, yelling with glee–and singing! It was one of the best days of their lives, and they were exultant.  One of the little Down Syndrome boys was nervous. In his darling little face was apprehension about being on the crowded bus. I stood over him and smiled, remembering poignantly some things in my life from long ago. I saw the older boys taking care of him. There were so many children with hearing aids, talking about all sorts of things. Every single child, except the little anxious boy, was talking and laughing.  I looked around and met the eyes of another passenger. She smiled at me and looked down as if to say: Isn’t this fun? These special children…took a lousy day…and brought us some sun.

Seared into my memory, so beautiful it will beautifully haunt me forever, were the completely hearing impaired children who could not speak or hear. They were just as animated as the other children, just as talkative. But they used their hands. I’ve never seen hands express like this. Up and down, side to side, so clearly ecstatic and excited. To be able to understand–without even knowing sign language–that these children were expressing lilting happiness–was a tribute to their beautiful, emotional hand movements. It was an astounding sight—to hear the excited conversations of the speaking children, at the very same time as the silent conversations of the non-speaking, hands-dancing non hearing children. In one small city bus, packed to the gills, this sight and sounds for all of us to see and share (instead of separating them, as suburban disabled children have to be, so the majority of the population never actually sees them), was exhilarating.

The hands of the non hearing and non speaking children…flying up and down and across and diagonally with such grace and precision, were like the great white herons I used to see across the treeline above the pond of my former home…up, up, up, up…silently across the clouds through the sky, like an otherworldly silhouette of a ghost. With so much I don’t understand, with so much I wish I had done, wish I had protected, wish I could cure, and the always-present and never-answered why– this much I do understand: The flying, silent words on wings of hands of the specially-abled children on the 34th Street crosstown bus said joy, joy, joy, joy. You just could not hear it, but if you looked up to the sky and watched them in flight, you could see it, feel it fly…oh the silent, ephemeral grace!…right into your heart.

Copyright by Nancy Angiello May 2011