The big yellow school bus was and is a rite of passage for so many of us. If you lived on Dykes Chapel Road and your mama was still in her duster, it was quite literally the only way to get to the red brick school house in town.

In first grade, Miss Moser, the elementary principal, pinned a paper cutout with the number 21 in bright red to the collar of my shirt. The bus driver deployed the red stop sign to get the attention of the occasional pick-up truck or tractor driver every morning as my older brothers and I scrambled down the sidewalk and up the steps to our seats. Kids graduated. New ones started school, but few things really changed as I cultivated a love/hate relationship with Bus 21.

It was a subculture all its own. The only thing it required was punctuality, with which I still struggle. We choked down our pancakes, combed our cowlicks, and grabbed our book satchels as we heard the bus coming. Mama was walking the halls wringing her hands, terribly worried we would forget our canteen money, leave our vocabulary word list on the kitchen table, or worse, miss the bus altogether leaving her no other choice but to get dressed and drive us in the Oldsmobile. That never made for a happy morning.

The driver would only sound the horn twice before pulling in the sign, closing the doors, and driving on up the road to Misty Ann’s house. The front two seats were reserved for kindergartners. Newbies learned quickly that only the high school kids sat in the back of the bus, the more popular, the farther toward the rear. The middle was left to the rest of us, creating some of the best and worst of childhood moments on those one-hour treks across creeks, down winding gravel roads, and past the water tower to and from home.

I was the self-proclaimed founder and president of several bus clubs with Tracey Annette, Ginger, Colette, and Sherry as my members — clubs that celebrated my interests in the Smurfs, the Care Bears, and even the Cabbage Patch Kids. Some years later, I accidentally stabbed a number 2 pencil through a fourth grader’s hand, but that was no worse than my older brother Tony setting a girl’s hairspray on fire.

We survived a near-death experience when the bus flipped onto its side in the ditch, and we learned more than Mama wanted us to know about the birds and the bees by watching seniors make-out in the back seats. There seemed to be an unspoken etiquette among bus drivers of my day that they only focused on the road ahead, never what was happening behind them except in cases of dire medical emergency.

Nowadays, many kids are carpooled back and forth in SUVs, but when I get behind a big yellow school bus with flashing red lights about seven o’clock in the morning, it always takes me back.

David Creel is a Vicksburg resident and a syndicated columnist. You may reach him at beutifulwithdavid.com.