Elsie Cecchetti was our bus driver. In the same way that Louis Tedone was SLO’s baby doctor. Elsie was everybody’s bus driver.

Yes, I go back to the days of Branch School’s yellow pickup with bench seats and the tarp overhead, when we bounced happily over creek crossings.

We waited for her at the Harris Bridge.

I think she had mechanical problems one morning–and it was a cold one–when Mary Gularte took me inside from the bus stop for some sopa. That was a good morning.

Both Mary and Elsie called me “Jimmy.”

We tormented Elsie with “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and then, in 1964, with “She Loves You,” ” I Want to Hold Your Hand” and she always headed us off in “The Name Game” song, before we got to “Chuck.”

And I always looked over the edge of the bus window as she drove confidently up Corralitos Canyon. There were some good drops there, but Elsie knew what she was doing. At the Canyon’s end, past the Dentons, she made a three-point turn that the California Department of Motor Vehicles should have filmed for posterity.

If there was a girl on whom I had a crush–and this was frequent–I looked a long time out the bus window after we’d dropped her off.

I once saw Elsie’s wedding photo, the day she married George, on the steps of Old St. Patrick’s on Branch Street. She was so beautiful that she took my breath away.

But she cleaned up after us at school.

She chewed us out when when we were jerks.

She laughed when we tried to be funny.

She cocked an eyebrow dubiously when we had excuses for being late.

But my most vivid memory is the day she cried. We were on our usual route with most of the stops ahead of us, near what is today Lopez Drive and Cecchetti Road, when she stopped the bus.

The old farmhouse, where she’d made a home and a family, was on fire. And it wasn’t just smoke. It was violent–big, ugly orange flames and billowing, acrid black smoke. Elsie threw the lever that opened the bus doors and stood at the bottom of the steps and she began to sob.

I don’t know–I was only about eight–that any of us, fifteen or so of us, had ever seen an adult in such pain.

And it wasn’t just an “adult.” It was Elsie.

I guess then we heard sirens from the CDF and they knocked the fire down, but it was too late. I don’t remember that part.

What I do remember is walking the rest of the way home in complete silence. We were shocked because we realized, just then, how much we loved Elsie and just how cruel life could be even toward the people we loved the most.

What we began to learn from her, in that terrible moment, was empathy.

Even a school-bus driver can guide you toward wisdom. I finally understand, now that she’s gone, that it was Elsie who always got me home again.