Prologue: On December 10, a bus driver for Williams Bus Lines, Mr. Robert Shinal, returned to work earlier than usual, around 5:20 A.M. Among lines of yellow school buses, Robert noticed a car parked where it should not be. Most disturbing, he noticed a hose coming out of the auto’s tail pipe and the opposite end served as a conduit of exhaust into the car’s driver side window. Inside the running car sat despairing Melissa Scholl with her two little children. As a school bus driver since Fall 2013, and doing (daily) the routine things gallant Robert Shinal did, Melissa’s desperate attempt to “get out” made me choke up and write the following poem about a day in the life of a very hurt American gal. That’s how I am and readers can look here for actual detail.
No dancer, no merry prancer,
no flawless “Bluebloods” ever sat
at sweet Melissa’s kitchen table.
To bury a husband’s tumultuous abuse
and go to a place where gasoline flames
would never touch her and the two kids!
So many stones hurled her way,
Melissa (32) had little else to do
except cry and let engine idle
while C02 overwhelmed the car’s oxygen.
Born in Wiesbaden Germany,
Melissa started to lullaby away the terror;
she sang Auld Lang Syne until the C02
intruded to a point where she forgot
the words and everything became
America the asphyxiated beautiful.
Gas gauge read about “empty,”
but the car engine purred like one of the
feral cats who roamed school bus yards
in search of discarded food.
No taste, no odor, the C02 surged deliriously
through the green garden hose
while Wilkes-Barre Township slept and
Melissa asked God why it had to be this way.
An unexpected tap upon car window,
could it be General Petraeus to the rescue?
No, no… Melissa yielded to Shinal’s
command and shut down the engine.
Window opened, hose dropped to ground,
and the killer C02 escaped before the children
got to make I.D. and warn the ozone.
Police car rotating lights, E.R. vehicle sirens –
Everything damned infiltrated Melissa now,
she became nervous about having
to continue with inhuman Ponzi activity
and senseless abuse.
Do you forgive me, Melissa?
This is how I am.
Strung out, hands-up, she surrendered to police.
Melissa placed trust in a cell’s “suicide watch,”
and youthful therapists who would talk about
“restoring your strength to make another try,
get a good paying job at Mohegan Sun Casino,
give some other man a chance
to stand-behind you and the kids,”
without (of course) a snake skin belt
and a Heineken hard-on.