The Driver Delano Mills Refused To Lose

Delano Mills is a small town in Missouri, the kind where the water tower still has the graduating class year painted on it from before I left for basic training, and where everybody who has ever ridden my bus still waves at me from the gas station forty years later. I raised my kids here. I buried my wife, Corrine, in the cemetery behind the Methodist church here, eleven years ago this past March. And for twenty two years, the district paid me to drive the activity bus, the one that hauls the football team, the band, the FFA kids and their steers, the debate club, anywhere a school van full of teenagers needs to go and come home safe on a county highway at eleven o’clock at night.

When I turned seventy, the district’s insurance carrier set a mandatory retirement age for paid drivers, and I understood it, even if I hated it. I turned in my keys on a Friday and cried in the cab of my truck in the parking lot before I drove home, because I did not know how to be a man who did not drive that bus.

Then the athletic director at the time, a good man named Otho Rasnick who has since passed, came to my house two weeks later and asked me if I would do it for free. The district could not find another driver willing to take the late-night runs for what they paid, and the parents did not trust a stranger with their kids on those back roads after dark. I said yes before he finished the sentence.