Riding The Bus

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Up until I was 10 years old, we lived in town.  In fact, we lived in a house right behind the elementary school.  I walked to school, so I could sleep a little later than other kids.  As you walked to school, you could hear the swings creak as kids were swinging and hear the bearings whine as the merry-go-round spun round and round until children became queasy and needed to throw up.  The big water oak tree with its trunk stained white was right between our house and the school.  It was stained white because that's the tree that teachers would send kids out to "dust the erasers" on.  No one does that anymore, but when there were chalkboards and chalk, you'd have to erase the board.  Pretty soon the erasers filled with chalk dust and needed to be dusted.  Kids would bang the erasers on the tree trunk and the chalk dust would fly.  Weird memories, for sure.

But in 1976, everything changed.  We moved to a house in the country.  There was no more walking to school 10 minutes before the bell rang.  We rode the school bus.  Since we lived far out of town, we'd have to get up early and wait at the bus stop (sometimes in the dark).  The bus stop was an old wooden, musty-smelling structure with a tin roof that my parents had moved out and positioned close to the road.  It had a bench in it.  It kept us dry on rainy days as we waited for the bus.

Mr. Lambert was the first school bus driver I remember.  He was a kind man.  I would ride my bike out to his house and sell him seeds for our 4-H project.  When he retired, Mrs. Audrey picked up the route.  Mrs. Audrey had a large family and they were all talented bluegrass musicians and singers that could play and harmonize with the best of them.  They lived back in the woods and kind of lived off the land.

Mrs. Audrey didn't only teach her kids music.  Why, she taught everyone on the school bus.  She had an 8 track player on her bus.   She would play Ronnie Milsaps' "Smoky Mountain Rains" and Merle Haggard's "If we make it through December," John Conlee's "Rose colored glasses," and George Jones' "He stopped loving her today." Those were weighty issues in those songs for a 10 year old to digest, but as the bus rambled across the backroads with the windows down on the bus and wind whipping through our hair since there was no air conditioner, my young mind was pondering, "What if they don't make it through December?"  I was also thinking about the couple in "He stopped loving her today," wishing that she would have come to see him before he up and died.  That would have been better and the song wouldn't have been so doggone sad!

We made good friends on the bus and we'd sit with them and talk and even sing as we got to know the words to every song on every 8 track tape Mrs. Audrey had.  The older, cooler kids sat in the very back of the bus.  Sometimes we'd even see some older boys kissing their girlfriends, but they'd have to be sneaky about it.  Mrs. Audrey had a big rear view mirror that stretched halfway across the windshield.  She would watch what was going on IN the bus more than on the road ahead, and for good reason!  In addition to kissing, sometimes there would be bullying and fights.  You would see Mrs. Audrey looking back in that mirror with a glare in her eye and an ash about an inch long hanging off her cigarette.  She ran a pretty tight ship.  She was no pushover and wasn't shy about keeping her passengers in line.

I rode the bus for a long time, but one day my friend got his driver's license and invited me to start riding with him.  He had a yellow 1979 Monte Carlo, and he would swing through our circle drive and pick me up for the ride to school.  He had a good stereo system in his car AND had air conditioning.  That was a plus.  There were, of course, some downsides.  My friend would pick me up after eating a big scrambled egg breakfast.  I would jump in his car, and sorry, gentle readers, my friend was quite flatulent.

I would close the door and my olfactory system would be immediately accosted by the most sulfurous, acrid stench you could imagine.  It would singe the hairs in my nose.  You would really need to shelter in place after experiencing the foul fumes, the malodorous aroma.  I would begin rolling down the window (no power windows) in frantic fashion, hoping for fresh air to fill that interior.

It was times like that that made me long for Mrs. Audrey's school bus where Merle Haggard, in his song, "Rainbow Stew" taught me to be hopeful for a better future where life was simple, happy, utopian  and harmonious.  I think I might have learned more on Mrs. Audrey's Bluebird School bus than I did in school.  I tip my hat to you, Mrs. Audrey, if there is a bus driver hall of fame, you deserve to be recognized in it.

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.

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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.

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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.