On the Bus

Most people were still asleep when Lisa Mohary started her day. She got up at four forty-four a.m., "angel time,” as she called it. That way she could have a cup of coffee in peace and quiet before heading out to pick up a bus full of kids.

Lisa was not the only driver with early morning duty. When her Toyota Camry with Kentucky plates pulled into the parking lot at Santa Cruz City Schools, the other drivers were already climbing into their buses for the morning safety check.

A smattering of clouds on the horizon turned bright pink as the sun rose behind them. The day had not even begun, but Lisa teared up as she tried to describe what her job meant to her. The students she transported were, for the most part, physically or learning disabled.

"I can't put it into words," she said, as she started her morning safety check. "A lot of people think, 'They're just bus drivers, don’t get behind them, they'll cut you off,' but every kid is my own. It makes me cry from happiness that I get to spend time with them."

“Can’t you just drive him to school?” my husband Blue asked apprehensively the first time little yellow school bus pulled up in front of our house. But Eliot loved the bus, and I loved his drivers. Lisa was Eliot’s driver for three years. One hundred percent Hungarian blood, she had the long straight hair of a child of the sixties, and the easy smile of a woman who rolled with the punches.

Lisa’s safety inspection took fifteen minutes. She lifted the hood and checked the oil, then walked around the outside of the bus checking her tires, her stop sign and splashguards. She climbed back in the bus, opened, closed, and locked the emergency doors, checked and covered the wheelchair lift. Then she drove the bus to the front of the lot to test the brakes, parked, and greeted her friend Tony the Irrigation Specialist. Dressed in shorts and work boots, he poured her a cup of espresso from a stainless steel thermos. This too was part of her morning ritual. On her way to her mailbox, she greeted her boss, the electrician, a maintenance worker, and her fellow drivers.

Lisa headed back out to her bus, pulled into traffic on Mission Street, and drove toward the East side for her first pick-up. She waved to a man she didn’t know standing at a metro bus stop.

Her first stop was an apartment complex off of Ocean Street by the river levee. She honked the horn to the tune of “Shave and a haircut,” her trademark beep. Several students emerged from the apartments and boarded the bus.

By the time Lisa pulled up in front of our house at ten minutes to eight, the bus was full. Most mornings as I escorted Eliot onto the bus, our local station, KPig in Freedom, California, was playing on her radio, Tom Waits with his gravely voice, or Emmy Lou Harris belting out some soulful, earthy tune. "Good morning, Mama Tory," she would say.

On the bus with Eliot was a hodgepodge of kids, including the group of first through third graders who made up his class at De Laveaga School. There was Carla,* a dark eyed beauty with a long braid down her back and a penchant for mischief. There was Brittany, who loudly announced all infractions to Lisa while her classmates tried to hide behind the wall of seats. There was Yesenia, and there was Cecilia, who had open heart surgery as an infant and had grown only a little bit. Yesenia’s giant palm encircled her tiny hand.

Taller and more mature than her bus mates, Yesenia told her driver, "Turn here, you need to pick up Juan." Lisa called Yesenia her "guide," and dropped her off last so they could talk.

When Yesenia got off the bus, Lisa told her she loved her. Yesenia always said "I love you" back. This was Lisa’s intent. She called it resonance, or love that spread like sound waves.

After she dropped Eliot and his crew at De Laveaga, Lisa headed to Bayview School for what she called her “Westside sweep.” Then she headed back down Mission Street. At two o’clock she would trace the same route she followed in the morning, only backwards. The kids were “still asleep” in the morning, but in the afternoon they would be loud and cranky. Arguments would break out, and my son would call Juan, who was nine, “Baby,” over and over until Juan couldn’t stand it and screamed for Eliot to stop. But Eliot would not stop. Then Lisa would get on her radio and call me, letting me know she was dropping off Eliot first. She had been driving my boy since he was three, none worse for the wear although Eliot could be challenging. “Everyone deserves equal respect,” she said.

“We are family,” she sang, when tensions rose and her passengers threatened mutiny. When she’d been off for a few days, she said, she had to mold them into family again.

Next to her mirror on the bus, she had taped a picture of her daughter’s fifteen-month old girl, and next to that was the picture of Eliot we had given her. Her own life was slowly moving toward Kentucky, where she and her boyfriend owned a house, and where they could be close to her daughter in Nashville. She grew up “off the turnpike” in New Jersey, but she felt more of an affinity with Kentucky.

When Eliot was in preschool, she played kids’ tapes on the bus and sang along with him. One day my neighbor heard a grown voice singing, "Quack, quack quack!" and looked up to see the little yellow bus rounding the corner. There in the driver’s seat with the window wide open was Lisa, singing loudly to The Farmer and the Dell.

When Eliot was obsessed with boats, she drove him past the yacht harbor after she picked him up from his preschool. Once he started going to school closer to home, she drove past an old boat on a trailer far from the ocean.

"I tell him I'm going to take him on that boat some day if the water comes high enough,” she said. The kids knew the routine, and when they passed it they’d say, “There's the old boat.”

After she moved I would miss her. I would miss her ability to embrace all of our children, the ones who disrupted the classroom and confounded their teachers.

"Every kid that comes in my circle," she told me, " is there for a reason. I drove this one kid who wore a bee-keeping outfit with rubber gloves. No one else could handle him but I loved him. He played heavy metal on his boom box. I try to let my kids be themselves. We’re just a melting pot driving down the road. “

“I'll drive anybody," she said. "I'll drive the undrivable, and we'll have a good time."


*(The names of Eliot's busmates are fictional.)