There are situations in which people become very important in our lives. Random passersby who say hello to us, store clerks in the store, neighbors stopping the elevator, acquaintances who call to ask how we’re doing… Or the streetcar conductor who was the heroine of our story today. If you read this lamentable story, you’ll understand that there are still good and simple people in the world!
It was Christmas Eve, I was going through my parents’ old letters and remembered a story they had told me. I was my mother’s only daughter. She got married late, and the doctors didn’t recommend having a baby. But she didn’t listen and went to the maternity clinic when she was six months pregnant.
I was born as a much desired child. And everybody adored me: my grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, everybody!
My mother started going to work early and every time before that she took me to the kindergarten near the academy. In order to go everywhere, my mother had to get up early and ride the very first streetcars. They were driven by the same people. We would get off the public transport, she would leave me in the caretaker’s hands and head back to the bus stop… waiting for the next streetcar.
When she was late several times, she was going to be fired. And we had to live, as many people did at that time, from paycheck to paycheck. So my mother had to come up with such a scheme: to let me, at the age of three, go directly from the bus stop to the kindergarten on my own. I did it all right the first time. But she was very worried about me. Running back and forth on the streetcar, to have time to watch, I went into the gate, dressed in boots with a scarf and a hat.
After a while, my mother noticed that the streetcar was taking longer to leave the stop and accelerated only when I entered the garden wicket. And so it went on for all three years that I went to kindergarten. My mother then could not understand why this happens. But for me it no longer worried. And it only became clear when I went to school. My mother and I went to her place of work, and the conductor and the driver shouted at me, “Hi, girl! You’ve grown up so much! Remember how we used to take you to kindergarten?”
I’m all grown up now, but every time I drive past that stop, I remember going to kindergarten myself. And I think of the kindness of those women who helped my mother every day as best they could. It was just that the streetcar was going a little slower, so that a complete stranger would be at ease.
