Last week’s blogging challenge prompt was to write about an event in my life. Unfortunately, the more pressing matter at hand was getting members of our household on the road to recovery from a respiratory illness. Priorities, people.

I feel a need to explain why I am about to launch into a trip down memory lane about riding the bus. The first friend I made when our family moved from Glasco to WaKeeney was Sara. Sara’s parents came from large families, as Catholic families tend to do–we’re talking double digits for siblings for both of them. Recently one of Sara’s cousins passed away, and I realized I probably never told Sara that her cousin was the first person I ever sat with on the school bus.

Over winter break (hang on–gotta do math…)–ok, 1975-76. During the Christmas 1975 break, our family packed up in the middle of the night (we’ll tell that story another day) and moved from Glasco, a tiny town in north central Kansas, to my grandparents’ farm north of WaKeeney in NW Kansas. I had always lived in city limits, so farm life was a culture shock. And farm life meant school buses. Up until then, I had always walked a few blocks from our house to the school with a few of my friends who lived in our neighborhood.

On the first day of school, Mom drove us to the school building to get us signed in. But to get home after school, I had to ride the bus. Since Jon was in the morning kindergarten class, I would be having this adventure on my own. I was a very anxious child, and I was also painfully homesick for my old house, old school, and old friends–every day for the first year, I would go to the bathroom at least once to throw up from pure anxiety and homesickness. That eventually got me a daily spoonful of minty Maalox at the teacher’s desk so I would stay put in the classroom. I didn’t know these teachers. I didn’t know these students–good Lord, does that boy have a KNIFE in his boot?! I didn’t know how to count by 5s because when I left my first grade class in December we were learning to count by 10s with drinking straws. I didn’t know that bus kids got dismissed at 3:15 PM and the townies got dismissed at 3:20 PM. I sure as hell didn’t know what bus I was supposed to get on.

When the voice came over the intercom and announced “Teachers, please dismiss the bus students at this time,” my teacher nicely explained to me that it was time to get my bookbag and go out to the buses. She had one of the other bus kids lead me out of the building to the south side of the playground where all of the yellow school buses were lined up, diesel engines rumbling and glass doors banging open. Some of the buses were long, and some were short. The other kid led me to the principal Mr. Godfrey Lang, who tried to figure out what bus I was supposed to be on. He got on his walkie-talkie and asked the bus barn to tell all of the drivers to stay put until he got this sorted out, because once the kids were all on their buses, the drivers beat it out of there pronto. The drivers were none too happy about this, because that meant they would be late getting to the high school to pick up those students.

Mr. Lang walked me up and down the line of buses, asking each of them where their route was. If they were south of town, he sent them on their way. He had to find the bus that went north east of town out by the old McCall place. My anxiety was through the roof, because all of these eyes in all of these buses were staring out of the windows at me as we walked along and asked each driver if they knew where I belonged.

We finally reached Bus No. 3, a short little yellow bus. Mr. Lang handed me off to the driver, Janice Hadley, and I slowly walked up a couple steps into the bus and looked around. I knew no one, and I didn’t know where to sit. Mrs. Hadley was not a patient person, so I needed to find a seat now so she could pull out and get on her way.

A pretty older girl with long brown hair and sparkling eyes smiled and patted the front seat next to her and told me I could sit there. I sat down and tried to answer Jolene’s questions as she made small talk, but I never have been very good at small talk, and I knew absolutely nothing about where I had been relocated a week prior. So it was an awkward ride, but I was grateful to have a place to sit and a nice person to sit next to.

Jon and I had to be standing at the mailbox at the end of the driveway by 7:15 AM or we were going to get left. On more than one occasion, we were running down the driveway with our sneakers untied and flapping on our feet as we yanked our belts through our jeans loops and clamored into the bus and about got toppled to the floor as Mrs. Hadley put it into gear and jetted off to the next stop. There was no waiting for you to find your seat. Most mornings we would watch out of the east window until we saw the shadow of the bus moving across the horizon on the road a mile east, and then we would gather up our stuff and head down to the mailbox. After school, we would ride the bus home. In the warm months, we would pull the windows down to get a breeze, so all of the seats always were coated with a dusting of dirt and smelled like hot vinyl. On the last day of school, Mrs. Hadley would pull into the Dairy Queen and get each of us a ice cream pushup as a treat.

I can’t say that I liked riding the bus as a little kid, because big kids bully little kids. I didn’t get it as bad as Jon since he was a boy and even more shy that I was. The older girls were always putting on their makeup and doing their hair and chatting about boys. The older boys were pestering the snot out of the girls and the little kids. We hated it each year when the new batch of sophomores got their class rings, because that meant the boys had weapons. They would rotate the rings so that the stones were palm side, and then they would lean over the seat and bash the little kids on the skull. It was a bus version of Whack-A-Mole. Sitting in one of the front 2 seats usually prevented the bullying, but we were some of the last kids to get on the bus, so we rarely got those seats. Afternoons during sports season were better, since the boys stayed at school for practice.

Being one of the last stops on the route meant that we didn’t know where our bus mates lived if they got on before and got off after us. I was surprised in my high school years to learn just how close we lived to one of my classmates. We also never knew who would be riding the bus with us. Occasionally, we would get on the bus and see our grade school librarian Mrs. Cook sitting in the front seat if her car was getting repaired. A few times we had to drive a few miles out of the normal route to pick up one of the high school kids who got grounded from driving. Sometimes we gave Mike Dunn a ride because he had loped off another finger in shop class and couldn’t drive yet; I don’t know how many whole fingers he had by the time he graduated, but I doubt it was many–it was not an unusual sight to see him sitting there regaling the other riders with the story of his latest joint’s demise and the looks of horror as his thumb or finger flew through the air and landed in the middle of another student’s woodworking project.

My bus riding days ended my sophomore or junior year of high school after I got my driver’s license and bought my first car with the money I earned as a summer school custodian. By then Mom was the secretary at the grade school, so even if I didn’t drive myself to school, I could catch a ride with her in the morning and then walk over to the grade school in the afternoon and wait for her to get off work. Riding the bus is one of those experiences I am glad I had, but I am equally glad that it is over. I didn’t enjoy the bullying atmosphere, and the pecking order that came with who was allowed to sit where and by whom. But I did try to follow Jolene’s example and welcome new little kids when they climbed up those steps on their very first days.