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 his peers.
The one thing that made all of the above even more unusual was that Mumbles was totally blind. He had help from his seeing - eye dog, a note taker for his school classes, and a room mate who helped him find his strange combinations of clothes.The crowning highlight to this story is that when he graduated with honors, he also moved on from a room mate to marriage to a beautiful girl whom he had met through a literary group that exchanged poetry. When he graduated he also had an excellent job waiting for him as a financial consultant to a large corporation.
At one point in his senior year in college a journalist with a city newspaper interviewed Mumbles and happened to ask him what advice he had for young people who were coming along behind him. He mumbled something funny, like, 'tell them to watch out for my old banana peels'. But then he said, 'No, I'm sorry. You and they deserve a real answer and here it is. Please tell them to know two very important things. Know them, I say and if they don't know these two things with all of the fiber of their being then do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to become convinced of these two things:
First, the environment we all live in, though it might appear to be hostile in its nature and random in its actions, is really a very loving and intelligent and meaningful environment. Whether you call that environment God or Nature or the Universe doesn't matter. Know this - it loves you and its ultimate goal for you is success, happiness, and becoming all that you can be. The second thing is very like unto it. You - no matter who you are or what your circumstances seem to be - you are a gift from this environment to the world and the times in which you live. There is no one else like you. There is no one else that can do the job or fulfill this gift to the world besides you.' Then he looked the journalist in the eye and with a smile said, 'And that is true of you also dear friend!'
And with that, according to his school friend, he mumbled something and with a wave goodbye he actually skipped, I mean really skipped down the hall, with his dog trying to keep up with him. So, George, that guy you saw today really is a story that you might want to follow up on."
I thanked Ed, and as we went back to my "getting off" street I began to go over how I would go about getting an interview with "Mumbles". This guy really IS a character. Or, perhaps I should say, "He really is a gift!"