[TheChamp-Sharing]

SHOW NOTES

 

There are some people you’ll never forget. In this week’s sketchbook episode, I talk about a school bus driver who made an incredible impression on me, and taught me an important lesson that I still use even today.

TRANSCRIPT

There are some people you’ll never forget as long as you live.

This week, we’re going back to 1999. I was in seventh grade, and my primary mode of transportation was a school bus. I can remember many, many frosty mornings standing on a corner in my apartment complex waiting for bus number 546 to lumber up to the curb.

The door would creak open, and every day it was the same bus driver, an elderly black man with gray stubble, a denim Oxford, and trucker cap. In my entire two years, I don’t think he ever missed a day.

I consider him an early mentor, and he taught me a lot about humility, and how to deal with trolls. He’s the subject of my sketchbook today.

***

Hello, and welcome to episode 23.

Let me just start this week’s sketchbook out by saying that I was bullied pretty bad. While I look back on my middle school days fondly, I can’t look at them without feeling some pain, either. And when I think about those days, the things that got me through the constant bullying and teasing and fights, it was the guidance of teachers and adults that ultimately believed in me and helped because they wanted to see kids succeed.

I went to school with a lot of kids who thought they were invincible and disrespected adults something awful. And when I say disrespect, I mean cursing, punching, and all kinds of other verbal and physical harm. It was tough to be a teacher in my middle school. There were many days where teachers ended up with black eyes for trying busting up fights. My principal got assaulted in the parking lot one night after school.

Not even the school buses were safe. Fights broke out there, too, more times than I liked to count.

Which brings me to my bus driver, a man just doing his job in a hostile environment.

***

No one ever knew the man’s name, so everyone just called him bus driver. He only had one facial-expression, and that was stone-faced, staring straight ahead. He looked like a man who’d had a life of quiet disappointment, probably because he was driving a school bus of rowdy kids who disrespected him every day.

He wore the same thing every day: a denim oxford and a trucker cap. He had a potbelly, and a voice that reminded me of Bill Cosby. In fact, that’s why the kids made fun of him. Not a single day went by where someone in the back of the bus didn’t bust out a Bill Cosby impersonation just to mock him.

The kids mocked him for what he wore. They mocked him for being quiet, taunting him and trying to get him to talk, and he would ignore them. He’d focus on driving the bus methodically through his serpentine route.

He took a lot of crap, and he took it gracefully.

***

Two incidents forever made me a fan of this man.

He was, at that point in my life, the only person I had ever seen who was bullied more than me. Those kids terrorized him like you wouldn’t believe, and as much as I hated to see it, seeing someone else be terrorized instead of me for a change was a welcome breather, time for me to reflect on those long bus rides home.

As is any nerdy kid’s custom, I usually sat in the front of the bus, directly behind him. I’d stare wistfully out the window.

One day, he spoke to me. I don’t know how or why.

But he must have believed I was only kid on that bus that was worth talking to, because he never spoke to anyone else.

He was incredibly friendly to me. I thought he hated his life based on his facial expression, but when he spoke, he was actually very warm.

“You’re not like the other knuckleheads in the back of the bus,” he told me. He’d ask me about my classes and how they were going. He’d ask about my family. And we’d have pleasant conversation. Hell, we talked about philosophy and about the ways of people.

***

Near the end of my eighth grade year, he said something I’ll never forget.

He said, “You look like you’re destined to go somewhere in life, wise beyond your years. The other kids here, they just talk and don’t know what they’re talking about. You look like the kind of kid that gets all the facts and makes up your mind for yourself. That’s gonna take you a long way.”

I don’t really remember the details of all our conversations, but I’ll never forget that.

Here was a man I only spoke to for maybe twenty minutes a day, but I learned a lot from him. I connected with him in a way that I didn’t with other adults. I viewed him as an elder, like my grandparents and great grandparents.

He believed in civility. He treated people with respect even if they disrespected you. He believed in jazz and its power to transform a person’s life. He believed in doing a good job because that was the minimum of what was expected of you. He believed that as a black man, it was his responsibility to be a role model to other black people, especially the young pups, and he told me many times that I needed to pass that on.

***

The second incident, I saw him break.

Those kids broke him.

I suppose one can only take so much before he snaps.

It was just before summer vacation at the end of the day, and a kid got on the bus with a CD player. I didn’t think anything of it as he passed. But soon, the assistant principal ran onto the bus and called the boy’s name.

Turns out the kid’s teacher had confiscated his CD player because he was listening to it in class, and he stole it out of his teacher’s desk before he left.

The confrontation immediately turned into a shouting match, and the kid called the assistant principal all kinds of bad names. The bus driver sat silently as the encounter unfolded, eyeing the boy in the rearview mirror.

***

Eventually, the assistant principal confiscated the CD player, and I don’t remember why, but they let the kid ride the bus home. The whole way home, he was making passive aggressive remarks about the principal, the school, and life in general, in colorful words I won’t repeat.

Anyway, the bus is driving down a busy street when the kid says something to the tune of, “Everybody in this school would be much better off without teachers treating school like slave day.” Imagine that, but with more curse words.

The bus screeched to a stop. Seriously, I didn’t know a school bus could stop that fast.

The bus driver put the bus in park and stood up.

“What did you say, boy?” he asked calmly.

“It’s a motherfuckin’ slave day!” the kid shouted.

“Slave day?” the bus driver asked. “You don’t know the meaning of slave day.”

And then the bus driver exploded. He lectured the entire bus on how insolent we were and as black people that was a damn shame. He said a lot of slaves died so we could be more than just three-fifths of a person and actually live in this society as free people.

And, predictably, the kid cursed him out.

And the bus driver shut him up and got even madder. He pointed a finger at the kid and said a lot of people stood up and spoke out just so we could ride a bus in the first place. And here this kid was with his first world problems mad, at the principal because the principal was enforcing the rules.

He opened the bus door, which led into the middle of traffic, told the boy to get the hell off his bus.

Then he drove off, leaving the boy standing on the curb.

I’ve never heard that bus so quiet. And if that wasn’t enough, the bus driver then glanced at us with a harsh warning.

“Any of you wanna talk like that, I’ll put you off my bus!”

And then he didn’t say another word.

***

Hoped you liked that one. That bus driver was unforgettable. And he got in a lot of trouble for that incident. After all, he lost his composure and endangered a child.

After everything transpired, he told me that he almost lost his job over it. But he didn’t seem to mind. A job’s a job, and he could drive a bus in any school district, probably better ones than mine.

Many years later, when I was working in corporate America and took a stand for what I believed in and almost lost my own job as a result, I thought of him, and his quiet confidence.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.” Hal Borland

 

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