The Rivals

When I was thinking about the school bus stop that is evidently in front of my building, I started thinking about the one bus stop that I had to go to for any lengthy time (apart from the bus that picked me up at my house). It was very close. I had to walk around the corner of my neighborhood side street, and then take a right. It was not the same stop where my sister had gotten off in grade school, but near it. Some interesting things happened there.

It was typically low-level delinquent stuff. We set fire to Binaca sprays and spoke irreverently. I don't believe I was particularly popular, but if you had to go to the stop, you had to be involved. As I was there to go to the public school, I was automatically aligned with the public schoolers when confronted by the bus belonging to the Catholic school. I have attended Catholic school in my life, but then I did not, and so they were our rivals in some sense.

I don't know why we were against them. I'm not sure that our sense of class division or religious strife was too pronounced. Besides, we must have been as affluent as they were, given the neighborhood. It's just a thing that automatically happened because we didn't know them. They did wear uniforms, unlike us. I think it may have been a girls only school, and I can't remember girls being at our stop offhand. There may have been.

Ideally, I would be able to close here with some report of an ultimate clash that transpired between us and them, but there was never anything more than each group hurling a lot of teasing at the other- us from the sidewalk, them from the bus. I don't even recall that they stopped around there. I think they may have just passed by every day. It would have pleased me to have something more of contact with them, but I didn't and never will.