Happy

            It was a cool summer evening the night I was riding the city bus. There was a lovely smell of barbecue cooking rolling on the breeze that wafted throughout the neighborhood. The sunset was setting the sky ablaze with orange and pink, illuminating the bus with the nostalgic light that summer evenings always brought.

            The bus was rather quiet for a summer night. Usually more people would have been riding at this time, but it happened to be quite empty that evening. Which was a very good thing for me. I wasn’t particularly fond of people. Still aren’t actually. An empty bus was just the thing I needed on a night like that one.

            I had wandered onto the bus feeling a bit depressed. My life seemed pretty crummy. Things hadn’t been working out too well for me and I was hoping a nice quiet bus ride, giving me time to contemplate and reflect, was just what I needed. More often than not, whenever I set my mind to thinking about some specific thing that’s bothering me, I never really get much thinking done. So I decided to just ride the bus and let whatever comes to come.

            Seeing as I was riding the bus back in my old neighborhood where I grew up, it only made sense for wistful memories of the past to come and haunt me that evening. As the bus drove past old places I remembered, it started to feel like it was only yesterday that I had been there. One stop in particular got me feeling a little sadder: the bus stop leading onto my old babysitter’s street.

            I had spent a lot of time there at that house with my babysitter. Since the day mom went back to work from maternity leave, I had been going to that babysitter’s house up until the second grade. My first friends were met there, memories I still can’t forget were made there. That house was just an abundance of sappy memories I cry thinking about. And here I was about to catch a glimpse of it in what seemed life forever.

            An old man shuffled into the bus. As the bus began to move again, I glanced back over my shoulder. The side of the large house and its spacious front yard came into view. The memory of us kids playing in that yard instantly came to mind. I swallowed hard, praying my eyes would stay dry. At a moment such as that one, I was very vulnerable. Reminiscing about my childhood threatened to bring some tears to my eyes, tears I wasn’t willing to shed�"at least just yet�"whilst sitting on a public bus, even if that bus did happen to be fairly vacant.

            The bus continued along its route while I stared out the windows at more of my surroundings. The bus turned down a well-known road, one we used to take to get home. The familiar houses we used to pass by daily sped past me as I stared out of the large windows across the aisle. And suddenly it darkened. We had reached the part of the street where the trees began. The tall, old leafy trees that were full of green leaves during that time of year formed a canopy overhead. Above the street was a web of leaves and branches that kept the street shaded most of the time. That was probably one of the reasons why we walked down it so many summer nights for our usual family-after-dinner strolls. Suddenly thinking about those walks made me feel sad again. I began to long for the days of innocence, the cavalier, nonchalant days that were carefree and happy. Happy…now I remember.

            I was often asked as a teenager to recall the last time I was happy. I remember telling them I wasn’t sure most of the times I was asked. But then it suddenly hit me. The last time I had been happy was then. Back when I was a little kid, back at the old neighborhood, back at my babysitter’s, back at my first school, back with my first set of friends, back with my parents when I didn’t make them so mad. That was happiness. That for me had been my one true time of happiness. I had always felt that I would never be truly happy again because I couldn’t get those days back, those blissfully ignorant days where I was stuck in a blissful oblivion of just pure, happy bliss.

            I was then reminded of a time in seventh grade when I had first learned about the problems that others faced in many countries around the world. I had never really known the full extent of what those people faced every day of their lives, what they had to wake up to, what they were forced to remember. It all seemed so horrible. And at first I had found it quite interesting. It made me want to help; to do something. But then later that night, I was sitting in the back seat of my dad’s car, driving under the street lights that pierced through the dark night, and I felt sad. But I wasn’t able to tell if it was sadness of something else. It was kind of like this great wave of anxiety washing over me and setting up camp in the pit of my stomach where it would stay all night. Looking back on it now, I knew what that was all about. It was the feeling someone gets when they become knowledgeable of something important and life changing at a young, impressionable age. It was not a feeling I was prepared for.

            I snapped back to the present and saw that we were approaching the very first elementary school, the school that was right across the street from my first house. Without hesitation, I tugged on the cord to signal the bus driver to stop. He pulled up to the bus stop. I asked for a transfer before heading towards the back of the school. I walked through the small parking lot at the side of the school. It was empty of course.

            A portable and a dusty baseball diamond came into view when I rounded the corner of the school until finally the whole yard came into view. You could see where the freshly paved concrete from covering up where the jungle gym used to be met the grass and the old pavement. I looked around and surveyed the school yard. I glanced from door to door, remembering the grade I was in when I had lined up in front of them after recess. I tried to picture each hallway that was behind each door. As I looked around the rest of it, I was able to see myself at various places in the school yard: over by the wall playing Pokémon and Yu Gi Oh! card games; at the fence under the trees talking with the pretty girls in the older grades; holding hands, spinning in a circle and singing ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ and ‘Kentucky’ on the grass. I could still hear the singing floating on the breeze while I stood there imagining.

 

We're going to Kentucky
We're going to the fair
To see the senorita
With flowers in her hair.
Shake it shake it shake it,
Shake it like you care,
Shake it like a milkshake,
And shake it everywhere.
Shake it to the bottom,
Shake it to the top.
Now turn around and turn around
Until you make a stop.
S-T-O-P spells stop.

           

I couldn’t help but let out a rather trite sigh melodramatically.

I left the back of the school and went around to the front. I saw the old, dirty black and yellow narrow tiles on the wall that lead to the kindergarten classrooms. The jungle gym for the kindergartners was still there like it had been when I had been there. The tall trees in the front yard of the school were still there along with the weird bush in the corner of the wall and the fence that us kids liked to hide in as if it was some sort of secret hide away.

I walked to the sidewalk and turned around to get a good look at everything. There was that dumb sigh again. Now I wasn’t sure if I was getting more depressed or just dramatic, maybe even both. Chances are it was more likely just the sappy nostalgia that I always seem to succumb to.

Finally was I at the point I had been looking most forward to all that time: getting to see my old house.

I turned slowly, gradually bringing my eyes to look at what I had wanted to look at for so long. There, down the street, diagonal to the sidewalk, sat the little corner bungalow that I had grown up in. That house all on its own was a huge cornucopia of happy memories. It was just bursting with sentimentality. Looking at it and thinking about it just made me sad. Especially when I looked at how little the new owners cared for that house�"my house. It had lost some of its charm that it used to have back when I lived there. The front yard wasn’t as nicely kept as mom and dad had kept it, the screen door looked old and cheap, and the garage paint appeared to be chipping a bit. The condition of the outdated car in the driveway was only proof of the new owners’ standards.

I had somehow managed to drag myself to the sidewalk in front of the house where I stared at it longingly. I could feel my lip quivering before I tasted salt dripping from my eyes into my mouth. One big, salty tear had escaped from my eye and made its way down my cheek. Then another one. And then another.

I stood there, looking at the house with tears wetting my face while I silently cried. I wasn’t too sure if they were tears of sadness of happiness. It had been so hard to tell those days. Either way, I knew that the owners probably wouldn’t have been too happy to find a weeping youth outside staring at their house. I tore my eyes away from it and skulked back to the bus stop near the school.

Sniffling, I slumped down and sat on the curb while I waited for the next bus to come. It was twilight now and the sun had just about disappeared, covering the street in a blanket of blues and purples. Any sign of the humidity that had been around earlier in the day was long gone by now and replaced with the chilly night air. By the time the bus arrived I was beginning to shiver a bit. I never did figure out why summer nights and summer afternoons were extreme opposites.

My transfer was still good so I showed it to the bus driver before dropping it in the trash. The driver gave me a new one. I thanked him and sat down in seat next to the window. The bus drove back up the same inclined road my last bus had gone down. At the top of the hill sat the gas station we used to go to. It was in the same parking lot as the Food Basics and the old Blockbuster and pizza place. My old babysitter’s eldest son had worked there part time at the grocery store back when he was in school. I remember when I’d see him I’d get so shy. I was terribly shy around older kids most of the time. Even in high school I still found them quite daunting.

The bus was passing by all the middle eastern jewelers stores. That could only mean that we were nearing the Dairy Queen. The driver stopped at the bus stop outside of it. They were switching drivers. That gave me a bit of time. I decided to get a soft serve while I waited for the drivers to switch shifts.

Walking into the old Dairy Queen brought back a flood of memories as well. I remembered that there was no seating inside, only out in the patio area that they had fenced off and set up with tables and umbrellas. So I took my ice cream out to one of the tables and plopped myself down facing the bus so I could make sure it wouldn’t leave without me. Then I thought.

I just sad there, licking my ice cream, pondering everything. I pondered the feeling I kept experiencing that night, I pondered my life up to then, I pondered why I was where I was at that very instance.

Before getting on that bus, I had been thinking about all my regrets. Just contemplating each one, feeling more and more sad as I thought about all my stupid mistakes, and then ever sadder as I thought about how petty I was being. Before getting on that bus, I had been wishing for a chance to go back and do everything over again, just restart life. Maybe things would turn out better the second time around. But now, as I sat there eating my ice cream, dusk sweeping over me, waiting for the bus to get moving again, I thought real good and hard. And I made sure I got some thinking done that time around.

As if on cue, the bus was ready to get moving again just as I finished off my soft serve. I hopped back on, presenting my transfer to the new driver and regaining my previous seat. It was dark outside now and the lights inside the bus shone brightly and fluorescent throughout the interior.

I was still thinking as I stared at my reflection in the window beside me. Would I want to redo my life? was all I could keep thinking. Sure I messed up�"a  lot. And I had done some things I wasn’t too proud of, some embarrassing moments I was really glad I only had to live through once, and some stupid things I wish I could forget. But I don’t suppose I’d want to forget the past either. As sad as it had made me to remember, I think I’d have been a little sad to forget, even the bad things I wish hadn’t happened. Because without those, I don’t think I’d be who I am today, I wouldn’t have learned from my mistakes. And some of the bad, embarrassing memories actually overlap with the good ones: bad because I was embarrassing, but good because I was happy. Without those, I wouldn’t have remembered what true happiness used to feel like, that blasé, ignorant bliss of childhood innocence.