Live and Learn

Mistakes teach us more.

Toby has been much more independent of late, wanting to spend time with his friends as opposed to his parents and sister.  He has been asking to take the bus home from school like his friends do, instead of being picked up.  (His older brother Josh was about the same age when he started taking the 31 Balboa to SF Day School - a straight shot from our house but at the time his friends' parents thought I was either abusive or incredibly lax. You know how these divorced Dads can be...)

So yesterday I said, sure give it a shot. We had talked about it, looked at the map and i assumed he knew the direction home from school. Toby had a cell phone in case he needed to contact us.  Away he went.  About 30 minutes later as Gabriella and I are pulling up to the house I get a call from Toby saying he got on the bus as we discussed and it went to the end of the line and he has no idea where he is.  (And guess what, neither did I.)

After a moment of panic and pure adrenaline (on my part, Toby was ok), Michelle and I got in the car and headed to the neighborhood that he ended up in.  But we could not find the intersection where he was on our GPS and his phone was running out of minutes, so we were in danger of losing contact with him!  That would have been a major problem because we really had no idea where he was.  It turned out that he had gotten on the bus going in the wrong direction from school and ended up in this very orthodox neighborhood called Bayit Va-Gan.  We finally found him by following the bus to the end of the line - there he was!!  (It was lucky we found him because otherwise he might have been adopted by some black hat family and turned into a Haredi.  The next time we saw him he would be sporting peyis and wrapping tfillin.)

But it was a good lesson for all of us, on a number of levels, and now Toby knows for sure the direction home from school.  I have to say, he remained remarkably calm during the incident, in contrast to his father.  And never again shall he leave the house without a fully charged cell phone with minutes to spare and money for a taxi :)