Riding the School Bus

When I leave the house at 6:30 am each morning en route to my real job that lies 50 minutes away, I can normally count on getting stopped at least a couple times by the flashing red lights of the school bus as it stops to pick up students.  It's still dark at this time and some of the parents (still in their robes) walk to the side of the road and are waiting with their children.  Others opt to stay warm and wait with their kids in their vehicles.  Once their kids are safely in the bus, they back their vehicles up and (I assume) get ready for the workday.

Image Credit

Did you ever ride the school bus to school?  I did.  In 1976 we moved from town out into the country. Prior to that, I was considered a "town student" and that meant that I could walk home.  In fact, we lived directly behind the elementary school.  But moving out to the country meant that we now rode the school bus.  I remember that it was exciting.  My parents moved a neat little wooden building from town and positioned it at the end of our driveway to serve as the school bus stop.  That way we could wait in comfort regardless the weather.  It was sort of similar to the one below, but bigger.

Image Credit

Our school bus driver's name was Mrs. Audrey and she and her family lived within spitting distance from our house.  Remember that description.  It ties in nicely to a related story at the end of this post. Mrs. Audrey was the mother of a large family of musically gifted kids.  In fact they played in a Bluegrass band.  Mrs. Audrey drove a Bluebird bus.  There was no air conditioning in the bus, but that didn't seem to bother us much.  Everyone would drop the windows down and let the muggy Southwest Louisiana wind in to blow through our hair.  We never complained about it being hot.

None of the kids ever gave Mrs. Audrey much trouble or at least not that I can remember.  Maybe we were smart for kids and realized that anyone who successfully raised five boys and two girls had certainly twisted more than her fair share of ears and given a spanking or three and wouldn't hesitate in administering a bit of school bus justice.  We didn't want to test her.  We just sat back, let the wind blow through our hair, and listen to the music.

Ah, the music.  Mrs. Audrey had an 8-track tape player that stayed on a continuous loop, playing the best of Merle Haggard, Ronnie Milsap, and Conway Twitty.  We knew every word to every song. Merle, Ronnie, and Conway were like the soundtrack to our lives.  Mrs. Audrey would stop at our driveway, open the door, and me, my brother, and my sister would exit the bus.  As the bus pulled away, Ronnie Milsap would be singing, "It was almost like a song, but it's much too hard to write...". We could hear him crooning way down the road as we walked down the driveway to our house.

That reminds me.  One time, for a reason that I can't remember, my brother and I didn't ride the bus home, but my sister did.  We had nefarious plans in store for her that day.  My brother and I climbed up on the roof and waited for her around the appointed time of the school bus arrival.  I forget who Mrs. Audrey had playing on her 8 track, but our plans for my sister best fit a Hank Williams Jr. song, so I'm gonna say ole Hank was playing.

Jenny came walking down the driveway and never looked up on the roof.  Her mistake.  As she passed directly beneath us, we both spit on her head.  Not nice, I know.  Well, it didn't take long for her to run inside and tell on us and before you know it Mom had us off the roof.  We were quickly found guilty and had to wait for the sentencing phase.

Mom told us that since we enjoyed spitting so much, we would have to stand in the bathroom and spit continuously into the commode for 30 minutes.  You might laugh at this penalty, but it was brutal. At the end of 30 minutes, both my brother and I were nearly dehydrated from all the liquids we had lost. I'm sure the level of the water in the commode rose due to our spitting.  You can be sure that we never spit on our sister again.