The Bus From Chicago

This is my first favorite book about travel from an "exotic" place. The Bus from Chicago by Annie DeCaprio, illustrated by Cal Sacks. I loved reading it over and over again. I was about six. It seemed hard to pronounce. I had a hard time getting my mouth around the words, but it was intoxicating in its rhythm and repetition.

This is the bus from Chicago.
This is Mister Gonzago,
who drives the bus from Chicago.

From the very first page I was mesmerized. The first picture shows us that the bus is headed for New York, where I was from, which made it even more exciting.

This is the grandma with boots on her feet,
getting ready so she can meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
is driving along from Chicago.

I was living a million miles away from The City, practically on a different planet. I was no where near Woody Allen or Hannah and Her Sisters or Alan Alda and The Four Seasons. I was up in the woods along the Catskill Creek watching Little House on the Prairie and Hee Haw and Smokey and the Bandit.

This is the subway under the ground
that goes along with a loud, loud sound
to take the grandma with boots on her feet
to the bus station so she can meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
is driving along from Chicago.

I had never ridden a bus that wasn't yellow and didn't take me to school and that had grown ups on it other than Joanne, our bus driver, who I asked one day, "Did you always wanna be a bus driver when you grew up?" I didn't understand why she thought that was funny. In fact, no, she said that she'd wanted to be a nurse. I asked her why she wasn't a nurse and she just sighed and said, "Well, you know, that's just how life is." I didn't know about how life was, but I did know that something seemed familiar about the subway under the ground and the bus from Chicago. Something good and comfortable, but that I couldn't really explain. Something in me knew what Chicago was and how far, at least that it was out there in the middle somewhere, but not that far really from NY.

This is Bill and his mother, too,
going to meet the grandma who
was in the subway under the ground
that went along with a loud, loud sound
to take the grandma with the boots on her feet
to the bus station so she could meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
has driven all the way from Chicago.

It has a momentum that I still find exhilerating! And it ends with the cover picture of the boy and the grandma finally reunited. Very satisfying.