It was my senior year in high school. I had been given the assignment of
speaking with the head of transportation for the school district for a report. I
had missed out on the choice assignments.
I walked over to the "bus garage" and waited to see Mike to find out the wonders
of a career in transportation. I was not thrilled.
Something happened though, as I walked through bay after bay of bright yellow
school buses and heard Mike talk about all the different routes his drivers
took, and how many drivers he had and how he was always in need of more drivers.
Within two weeks I was driving a sixty-passenger school bus and had students on
the bus that were my age. It seemed strange. It WAS strange!
I would drive a school bus for two and a half years. I photographed the buses by
airplane during a bus rodeo (an event that takes bus and driver through
difficult manoeuvres). I photographed a bus accident in which the bus rolled on
its side (no one was seriously hurt). I washed buses. I got up in 30 below zero
weather at 5 am to be sure all the buses would start.
The day after graduation I got up and went to work driving a school bus. My
classmates couldn't understand why I would want to do something like drive a
bus.
Sometimes we are asked to do things that don't impress us much. Often it's
because we don't think it would impress anyone else much. We don't want to get
our hands dirty, or be seen doing something that others might find "uncool".
Yet I still have cards from parents who appreciated the watch care of their
children on the way home from school.
There was one little girl who came up to me, she was the last one to get off the
bus and she was crying. It seems she had lost a small leather bag with marbles
in it. She could have lost it at school or before she got on the bus, but I
looked all over the bus as I swept the aisles anyway looking for her marble bag.
I didn't find it so, I went to the local five and dime and came away with a new
leather bag filled with new marbles and gave it to her the next day.
I would have forgotten all about this incident, except for one thing. Her mother
came up to me a couple of years ago. I asked her how her daughter and son were
doing. He was in college; she was married with children. She also said that her
daughter still brings up from time to time her favourite bus driver who cared
enough about the loss of something precious in her childhood to do something
about it.
That seemingly insignificant gesture twenty years ago still leaves a mark on the
soul of that little girl now grown it's also left a mark on me, and it didn't
take more than a dollar (at the time) to do it.
How many times do we think that we have to be "somebody" to affect the lives of
those around us?
Author unknown. If anyone has a proprietary interest in this story please
authenticate and I will be happy to credit, or remove, as the circumstances
dictate.
Thanks to Heartwarming
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