Am I "Special"?

On the way home from work, I was stopped in the usual traffic. To pass the time, I scanned the sidewalk on my left and there was an ambitious black ant, the size of a small bus, making his way over the pavement. He was carrying something far larger than he should have been and as only able to go for a few steps before pausing, catching his breath and then starting again. A couple of minutes into it, he seemed to finally be doing fine when all of a sudden, a passerby stepped on him and smashed him and his cargo into a little black smudge.

And then, I am not sure why, but I suddenly remembered that my mother drove a school bus. And not just any school bus, a little yellow one. The same little yellow school bus I used to take to school. This was before the little school buses were dedicated to the “special” kids. And we lived in a small town in North Carolina, our house standing tall and proud on the corner of Nowhere and Who Cares. There were only 100 or so people in my school. We didn’t need big busses. We didn’t need to have normal people busses. Or at least I think so. I started to panic, was I “special”? Was I the kid in class that had issues getting his dried macaroni to stick to the colored cardboard? Is it possible that instead of attaching the macaroni, I was busy eating the glue? Did I have a problem coloring in the lines? If I was “special” then, am I “special” now? Is that why this evening as I type this I am also strangely interested in what happens to Stuart Little? Perhaps I just don’t know I’m “special”. Perhaps I am just living in my own little bubble of presumed normalcy. That’s something I will have to ask the voices when they start talking to me later.