Big Yellow…Taxi?

Yesterday, DH broke down and bought Frick a cellphone. I’ve been anti-phone, mostly because this is a kid who can’t find his own shoes half the time, and also because, well, he can’t find his own shoes half the time. I wasn’t too keen on having him have to keep up with a phone. Plus, he loses his natural mind around electronics, so I had these nightmare visions of phones going off in class, him answering, then shushing the teacher because he couldn’t hear the bonehead on the other end. But DH was worried about contact, and let’s just say testosterone won the day. Frick came home with a Motorola RAZR, and we have a bigger cell bill.

Today, I had to revisit my anti-cell bias. Frick spent his first afternoon at the YMCA aftercare program at school. Fine. He was having fun. Fine. We were on our way to get him–late, since we have to break our “stay late at school” habit still–when he texts to say “Go home. I’ll meet you there.”

Huh??

So I call. He tells me “I got on the bus.” At that point, about three thousand neurons in my brain, all of them in the protective mom lobe, melted. “What bus??” I’m screaming. “Oh, I’ll just have the driver drop me off at the corner,” he says blithely. This is sixth grade logic working. Since a bus picks him up at the corner, clearly a bus leaving school will be happy to drop him off at the corner he specifies, right?

Nightmare visions of missing kid ending up at the bus depot in the dark, clutching his 15-freakin’-pound backpack hurtle through the cortex. I can’t get a straight answer out of him about where he is. I order him to hand the phone to an adult. The adult–the driver–has a thick Jamaican accent. So now I’m trapped in a calypso nightmare that still ends up with my kid alone in a dark bus depot.

Finally we suss out where he is. We tail the bus down the road and finally spot it. We follow it until it stops, and out pops Frick. He looks none the worse for wear. I decide to kill him. DH plays the voice of reason (a new one for him in cases like this–usually he’s the one playing the role of freaky parent) and instructs me to be gentle. Good thing, too, because Mr. Frick had scared himself nearly to death, quivery lip and all. He won’t be jumping on any strange buses anytime soon.

And now I have to take to my bed with a cold compress on my aching head. With a side of whiskey, thanks.