On the bus coming home from errands yesterday, I was reading a memoir by a distinguished poet (I’ve been reading a lot of those lately) and feeling complacent about acquiring the four diplodena plants in the tote bag at my feet.

Abruptly, a chattering crowd of children boarded the bus. School must have just let out. Carrying book bags, violins, and various other necessary objects, they poured toward the back, screaming happily at one another. They looked to be fifth graders by the size and noise of them. Indifferent to the adults, they crowded into the exit space next to a rear exit that wasn’t working, and as the bus progressed, the driver kept having to yell, “Back door doesn’t work. Come to the front!” whereupon several children would roll their eyes and stay put until someone else on the bus yelled repeatedly, “back door isn’t working!” whereupon they would roll their eyes again and get off.

Two boys who more resembled seventh graders stayed at the front, looking blank and superior, distancing themselves markedly. I suspected they were from a different school.

Eventually all of the children got off, and the bus returned to its usual noise level.

My kid used to take the train from the suburbs to Philadelphia after school many days, because they had fencing practice, and the conductors often often came and made the kids (all from various different private schools) shut up. My kid reminisced fondly about it. It wasn’t personal. They were just kids. “We used to just laugh and laugh,” they said.

I guess I’m an outlier. I taught elementary and middle school for 25 years, so I’m somewhat inured to the noise children make and how crazy they are, but one of the reasons I have hearing aids is that I had to eat lunch on the Lower School side of the cafeteria and the noise was the intensity of a hundred table saws all shrieking at once. And when a shrieking bunch of young people board my bus, I tense up and have to remind myself it’s not my problem any more. I don’t have to supervise. One on one, each child is oddly reasonable. In a crowd, they’re remarkably manic.

Once, I was with my (now very adult) kid and my grandchild on a bus full of noisy kids. The driver made them all get off at the stop where we were changing buses, because they were fighting, and after they all got off, two of the boys squared up and started fighting on the sidewalk, while all the others (twenty or more) started filming them with their phones and laughing. The staff in the UPS store came to the window and watched behind the glass, shaking their heads. We stood a little way away, watching with interest, and then boarded our bus when it came.

It was a pretty pathetic fight, honestly. The little skinny boys were swinging randomly and not connecting.

When it comes to loud crowds, I guess I’m saying, people get a little crazy. It’s okay when it’s your loud crowd, when it’s St. Patrick’s Day, or the Mummer’s Parade, or when one of our teams has won. Everyone gets into the madness, and if a traffic sign or two gets toppled or a few cars set on fire, the response tends to be muted. But when one of our underground dirt-bike meetups takes over a roadway, with (mostly young) riders rearing their bikes like horses and revving their engines, the discussion on social media tends to get violent.

In related news, yesterday a man in a Toyota Highlander, surrounded by a group of people on dirt bikes, shot and killed one of the riders and injured another. I am not sure who threatened whom first. I think it’s partly how loud things get and partly because we perceive those noisy people as someone entirely different from us, and therefore a threat. (Also, they get in the way of cars, and people in cars tend to behave as if they’re in a fight for their lives anyway, even though they’re sitting down on nice padded seats with their music playing.)

We have a little group of neighborhood children that used to run wild at night around me; they did things like break stop signs, kick the front-sidewalk chairs, and even try to break down my neighbor Victoria’s front stoop (she was very angry, because she had to get a mason out to fix it; they didn’t succeed in breaking mine, even though it has big cracks in it). Those kids played ding-dong-ditch on my front door, often late at night, until I came out and caught them at it and reacted with amusement, whereupon I wasn’t fun any more. They got a little older and they settled down some, thank goodness; I live alone and am old, so someone beating on my front door at night is scary, if I don’t know it’s just the tweens around the corner.

I don’t think the rage of adults about the damage children do is anything new, but what worries me is that so often today, those adults are armed and primed by social media, and so are the children.

And yet people love to reminisce about their own childhood, and about the pranks they got up to, with no sense of dissonance whatsoever.

I’ve been reading a fair number of memoirs lately, you see. It’s pretty consistent. As children, these lovely people with their canes and their macular degeneration, who take statins and try to go to the gym, whose parents are long dead, did horrible things. And now they are old, old enough to write their memoirs. Their balance isn’t as good as it once was, and they rarely shriek with laughter when something valuable breaks.

I’m not saying I should shriek with laughter when something valuable breaks, but it would be a good start.