One moment we thought we were about to be thrown off, and the next thing we knew the bus was slowing to a stop. But just as we were about to relax our hold, it took off again. It’s not easy riding on a bus, I decided. No wonder I’d never tried it before. At one of our stops, Lenox asked me, “What does it mean—Blooming Dales?” I wasn’t certain, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Let’s figure it out,” I said as the bus began to move again. “The first part is easy: I’ve heard people in the park talk about the plants. They look at the flowers and say, ‘What lovely blooms.’ Or they say, ‘The flowers are blooming.’ Obviously blooming means ‘flowering.’” “And dales?” Lenox asked. I paused a moment, thinking hard. Dales? Dales? I knew I’d heard the word before. Suddenly it came to me. I’d heard the word in one of the poems that PeeWee read aloud. How did it go? I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills … Oh, dear.
