Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The School Bus Doesn't Stop Here Any More

I attended a one-room school for my first six grades.  For my remaining six I rode a big yellow bus to school each morning, and returned on it to my home each afternoon.  When I was 24, in 1962, a son was born to my wife and I.  He began his studies in a Baptist Church school in Mississippi.  It was located right across the street from our home in Marion so he walked back and forth each day.  The church minister, whose wife was the school teacher, raised, kept, and hunted bird dogs, so I figured this church thing couldn’t be all that bad.
In January 1970 I moved to California, along with my wife, two sons, and a daughter.  The older son and the daughter, both being of school age, learned to ride a big yellow bus back and forth to school on a daily basis.
In May of that year our family once more moved, this time to New York State.  The son and daughter were each passed on to their next grade in California, and did not return to school until that September as New York State children do.  On the first day of school the big yellow bus stopped out front of our home, picked up the two of them, and off to school they went, not to return home until mid-afternoon.
As the years passed the second son joined the first two children, and still later our newest child, our baby girl, also joined them for the daily to and fro on the big yellow bus.
It was now approaching the early fall of 1979.  I was now 41, while the eldest son was 16, and the baby-girl was now 8 years of age.  With nothing better to do one morning, I awoke in the midst of a heart attack, or a myocardial infarction, as the good MDs like to put it.  For about a year I wondered about my mortality.  In the fall of 1980 I had a little arterial bypass surgery, and back to work I returned, good as new.  All that year the old yellow bus kept up its daily trip, never lagging, nearly always on perfect time, as regular as clockwork.
The elder son graduated high school and stopped riding the bus as he joined the Marine Corp, but the big yellow bus kept up its daily stop to pick up the other three.  The eldest daughter graduated high school a couple of years later, and then the second son three years after that.  Still the big yellow bus stopped on a twice daily basis for baby girl.  Then it came the summer of ’87 and baby girl turned 16 years of age.  I bought her, of all things, a pickup truck.  She loved her Toyota and drove it back and forth to school each day.  All of a sudden one day the big yellow bus stopped stopping.  How could it do that after all of these years?
Several years passed.  I had some more arterial bypass surgery in ’91.  Baby girl married, and lo and behold, a beautiful girl child was born in 1992, and later, in ’94, a boy sprung from this union.  It was only a few years until the big yellow bus began stopping at our driveway again as baby girl and her family built a modest home next door to her mother and me.  This continued until the fall of 2011 at which time grandbaby girl had graduated from high school, and her younger brother had finished also.  Once more the big yellow bus stopped no more.  Now it is a year later and on a daily basis I watch the big yellow bus pass my home with nary a hesitation.  It has come to a time in my life I realize I must be getting on in years ‘cause the school bus doesn’t stop here any more.

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