Thank you, Internets.
I rode a school bus to school from kindergarten to the eleventh grade. During that epic span of time, I experienced a lot of weird shit.
One time an odd (probably heavily medicated) seventh grade boy approached me (at the time a mere first grader), sat down next to me and told me I had nice legs. I was 6.
I suddenly became very weirded out and remember clenching my knees together and kept staring at the floor. I think I said “thanks” just so that he went away because he was creeping the shit out of me.
Once he got off at his stop, a bunch of seventh grade girls came up to me and handed me a note, telling me I should give it to my mother and to call the school. It was a recap of what happened. I don’t remember that kid bothering me anymore.
In not-so-after-school-special territory, I remember being interrogated by police after our very Italian bus driver, Rocky, ripped off the bumper of a car after making a right hand turn…into it. The owner of the injured Saturn was cradling her bumper on the side of the road as if it were her bleeding child. (I can sympathize today.)
But, one of my earliest memories at five, was of, appropriately, George Michael on the bus. He wasn’t literally on it, but he surely was in spirit. I think I was one of the last kids left on board that day, and my bus driver enthusiastically explained to me her love of George, whose pictures and random “symbols” where plastered on the interior panels.
There were several, and I remember one having to do with a cross and the Faith album. Just today, I now know what she showed me:
In the lower left hand corner of the album is the title and artist name, beneath which five symbols appear. These stand for Faith, Music, Money, Religion, Love.
I can now die in peace thanks to the spiders that crawl the Internet and retrieve this kind of completely useless information. Now, how she was allowed to cover her bus in that jank is another story it cannot assist me with.
