When I Was Your Age I Walked...

We live a few miles from the university campus so every morning I get up at 7 to catch the bus at 7:30, arriving at school in time for my 8 o' clock class. I am the only white boy, only american, on this bus. I am also one of the only students. This bus is mainly comprised of grounds persons, kitchen staff, and other blue collar types. I stick out like a sore thumb.

This morning I was standing at the bus stop with the working class heroes when all of a sudden some words were said in Arabic and they all started walking away. We have been getting absurd amounts of snow. They have not seen this much snow here in 30 years. The latest storm dropped a little less then 2 ft on us in 24 hours. All this to say the school bus was not running this morning. So I walked to school...

That old phrase came to mind. "When I was your age I walked to school in six feet of snow uphill both ways." I lived this reality today. Luckily it wasn't that big of a drag. As we departed from the bus stop I got to talking with this one worker, I think his name is Mohammed, and soon I learned he spoke pretty good English. We ended up splitting from the rest of the pack, taking a shortcut, which was suppose to get us to campus more quickly than the others. Within our shortcut we ran into another worker on his way to campus. This fellow was the guy in charge of the buses. Mohammed and I started giving him some crap about there being no buses and we all had a good laugh.

The bus guy's name is Brahim and he speaks english well too. Anyways, the three of us continued our bitter cold walk (it was below freezing this morning) talking about our wives and kids and what not. About every ten steps one of us would almost fall on our asses because the ice was so bad. They taught me what to say in Arabic when this happens. I think it is the equivalent of "OH SHIT!" in English. I'm not sure though.

I don't know why I share this story. It's just that even though it was so early and we had such a long way to walk, and it was freezing cold, and the ice was almost breaking our necks, there was a moment when I felt so blessed that the buses weren't running today. As we were getting up the mountain to the campus gate, the sun showed up and poured it's rays on all of us, and I thought of those John Lennon lyrics: "A working class hero is something to be."