Bus stop is the center of neighborhood social scene

The school bus stop is the new town square.

Forget about the Internet and our wireless age of distant electronic communication. School bus stops are where Naperville gets together.

If you live in Naperville, chances are you live in one of its 300 leafy and appealing subdivisions -- subdivisions dotted with swings and trampolines. Subdivisions with front yards sprouting athletic team signs. Subdivisions crawling with kids.

Where there are kids, there are buses. Where there are buses, there are knots of moms (and dads) on corners, coffee in hand, arms crossed against the morning chill.

There are one or two moms in pajama pants, an efficient garment that goes from bed to bus stop. There are dogs on leashes, straining to get at each other, and maybe a new pup, the center of attention.

For grade-schoolers, backpacks are lined up on the sidewalk. The rule is clear and unspoken: Whoever gets there first gets to put his pack first in line and go play while they wait for the bus. When the yellow behemoth rolls up, every child enters the bus in the order of their lined-up backpacks.

Bus stops are where friendships are forged, news is disseminated and gossip is dished.

You've heard national politicians say "All politics are local." They don't know local.

You don't get more local than the school bus stop at the end of your cul-de-sac. You can't get any more grassroots than when you're standing on grass roots, half your attention on your adult conversation, one eye on the kids, one ear listening for the rumble of the bus before it turns the corner.

When you're at the bus stop, you're at the cellular level of the entire social structure.

Think of it as a pyramid of politics, with a broad base comprised of millions of neighborhood bus stops. The next level would be subdivision homeowners' associations, then school districts, then town meetings, then city council, then county government and on up to the President of the United States.

These cozy bus stop groups hit their zenith on the first day of school. That day, the groups of adults swell. Everybody's out there, with loads of dads, moms and a grandparent or two.

On the first day of school, the sidewalk intersections in our subdivision sprout card tables bearing coolers of juice, columns of cups and flat boxes of Krispy Kremes.

Backpacks are lined up, kids are playing ball and chasing each other. It looks like it'd be worth dropping in on the party, if only to join the kids shooting hoops in the nearest driveway or to hook a doughnut off the card table.

What the moms in pajama pants holding stainless steel coffee cups aren't thinking about is how quickly it will pass. Before your child hits middle school, he will banish you from that corner.

Forget about enjoying the daily chat with your neighbors. Your children are "old enough," as they will tell you, and you are supposed to be elsewhere, perhaps holding that same coffee cup in the car on a packed freeway heading downtown.

Too bad if you miss the sunrise, the puppy, the new neighbor.

But, with luck, if you're at the same bus stop long enough, you'll keep the friends even after you're kicked off the corner. They can become as close as the friend you made when you were a new mom tentatively holding your first baby and you met another new mom not too sure of herself either.

When our daughters were in grade school and I was a bus stop mom, our family was still moving frequently. I knew, moving into a neighborhood, that we needed friends and we needed them fast. I would not have, like my foremothers, 20 years in the same house on the same street.

So I became the one to invite the women back to my house for a quick coffee, to institute a block party, to organize a baby shower.

It worked. In our Toledo neighborhood, our group coalesced so successfully that one of the dads, for Christmas, gave us sweatshirts emblazoned "Bus Stop Babe."

I was at that stop when each little daughter took a deep breath and climbed the tall step onto the bus for her first day of kindergarten. I was at that bus stop, surrounded by friends, the morning our huge moving van wide-turned itself around the corner and rumbled down the street toward our driveway.

We had the camaraderie, the kids and the coffee -- everything but the comfy pajama pants.