For me, the surest sign of the imminent arrival of autumn is not the changing light, the cooler temperatures, or the ads touting pumpkin-spice flavors.
No, the pending change of seasons is surely marked by the arrival, in the mornings and in the afternoons, of school buses—as unique a sight as the “long shining line” of undergraduate-bearing station wagons that Don DeLillo wrote about so memorably in the opening pages of his novel White Noise.
Yet the sight of school buses does not inspire nostalgia in me as much as relief and even gratitude. Here I must admit one of the great blessings of my life: I have essentially no firsthand experience with school buses.
For the first few years of my educational career, my parents sent me to a private school that expected its students to be delivered by their parents each morning and picked up by their parents each afternoon. (In my three-decade-old…
