The Joys of Growing Up -- Part 2

"Are you sure?" she said as she sat around a group of female plastic admirers.

I hated those Tupperware parties. It was the third Saturday of the month and that meant nothing but the mixed smell of overused hairspray and perfume conjoined with female gossip and wrinkled women's magazines that I wasn't allowed to look at. It was enough to make an 8-year old run naked around the house screaming "Jimmy Cracked Corn" -- but that's another story. However, when you are that age, you go where Mom goes.

"Yes. I think it will be fun," I said over the noise of snapping lids.

"OK. We'll ask your dad when we get back home," and her attention went back down to this god-awful brown plastic lunch pail in which the handles snapped on the top. I could only hope and pray it wasn't for me. I had my eye's set on the Dukes of Hazard double imprinted aluminum bad boy I had seen on T.V. So, I went over to the window and sat, happy and silent, looking out at the pines and two poodles attached to themselves.

I may have been the only kid in America who actually WANTED to ride the school bus. Everything about it appealed to me – the magical door crank, the green vinyl seats, the half-mast windows, the bumpy, hypnotic ride. And, my drivers were all characters.

Coach Garrett was about 6-4 and as nice as a picnic. If you remember, there was a seat to the immediate left of the driver in which you had to go under a metal bar to get to. Well, that's what I called "the captains seat" and it was mine. Coach C had this game to where he would always find a way to steal my new brown Tupperware lunch pail in which the handles snapped on the top. He would take it when I was distracted and would only give it back once I solved some sort of riddle he had schemed up. I lost 20 lbs. that year. He was all smiles and big laughs until some kid crossed the line and his eyes cut up to that rectangular mirror and narrowed. Then he would thunder "I'm gonna beat your butt," and every kid shut up. When a guy looks like a white Patrick Ewing, you don't want to test his follow-through.

Calvin was my second bus driver – 5-8, 95 pounds, and gayer than a parade. I guess I don't really know that for a fact, but he wore Elton John glasses and sported fur coats behind the wheel. Calvin's sworn enemy was a project kid named Miles who always made fun of Calvin and his "boyfriends." I always thought Calvin gave him pretty good lip back, until one day Calvin dropped Miles off in the middle of nowhere and told him he would never ride his bus again.

My last memory of Miles was of him giving our entire busload a two-finger salute as we drove away from an old lumberyard. Calvin didn't drive us anymore after that.

My last bus driver was an old white woman named Anna. She was diner-waitress feisty and smelled like she had just plowed through a carton of Winstons. Her face was gray and wrinkled, and she loved me. She called me Skinny -- because I wasn't. Since Coach C's route I had gained those lb's back.

Anna died late in the school year and I stopped taking the bus, but I always missed it. That's because my mom started driving me to school in the yellow station wagon that was missing the front bumper, side panneling and a horn that would put and 18-wheeler to shame. My friends callecd it the "special bus" or what we refer to these days as the "short bus". It was yellow, big and not in the best shape but what else would haul the GDP of America's Tupperware? As if being a young lad with the initials B.O. wasn't bad enough, I was now also "special".

Ahh, Tupperware parties, Blue Bird buses, being called a retard, pine trees and weird poodles were a few memories of my youth.