by Donald Hancock

Created on: June 29, 2009

A CHARACTER ON THE BUS

On a frosty afternoon I got on my regular "going home from work" bus ride and greeted my favorite bus driver with "Hi Ed!" As I went to a seat about half way back, I saw a very unusual sight. It was a young man dressed in, what appeared to be, black tights and a frilly silk shirt with a red bow tie. On his head he wore a sort of Scottish tam with a feather on one side. He had a seeing eye dog that was wearing a vest of the same material as the colorful tam. He certainly caught my attention, and several other people on the bus seemed to be whispering and pointing toward the gentleman as they talked. Since my usual "getting off" place was near the end of the bus run, and since the gentleman and most of the other passengers had already left the bus, I decided to go on with Ed to his "turn around" spot. I moved up to the seat just in back of the driver and we began to talk.

"Ed, I just had to ask you if you know anything about the man with the seeing eye dog. You know that I am a writer and I am always hungry for a story. Do you know anything about him?" "Oh, I know all about 'Mumbles', George, and I will be glad to give you a full story. Wait just a minute until I get up here to a stopping place and I will take a break and tell you the story just as I heard it from one of his school mates."

Ed brought the bus to a stop in a wide parking space and turned to me with a smile on his face. " 'Mumbles' is a real character if there ever was one, George. His friends called him 'Mumbles' because you had to ask him to repeat almost everything he said. The mumble type of speech was partly due to a lack of self assertiveness. It was also partly the result of a slight speech impediment.

They say he was a real character because, for one thing, he chose to wear very strange clothes combinations as though he might have stayed up for hours just thinking them up. For instance, he might wear over-alls with a tuxedo shirt with diamond - like cuff links. Or he might have a plaid shirt and leather pants with a denim vest. Anything to appear 'strange'.

But to those who knew him well, Mumbles was even more enigmatic than what appeared on the surface. He was highly intelligent - in the "Mensa" range of intelligence. He was a prodigy on the cello from the age of five. He was generous and very loving. Yet with this strange and incongruous mixture of traits, James Watkins, as he was called officially, was very highly thought of by his teachers and most of

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