BUS STORY # 380 (Old Tex Bus Story # 2)

Horses and Bus, a photo by Stephskimo on Flickr.

This is part of a series I call the Old Tex stories. You can read about Old Tex here, and you can read the first story here.


You could never tell where an Old Tex story was gonna come from or go to.

I have no recollection of what he was telling us about when he took a sharp right turn to tell us he’d been married 28 years.

This was back in East Texas. Sometime after the marriage ended, she married a guy who up and got cancer and died just four years after.

He found out about this when the man’s kids called him up to explain they didn’t have any money for the funeral. He was a good man, they told him.

Well, it didn’t matter to him how good a man he was, he couldn’t see paying for the coffin of the guy who married his old lady. He didn’t even know the guy, didn’t know his kids.

It wasn’t like they didn’t have any money. She made good tips. And he used to send her money -- he’d send her a thousand dollars when he was out on the road, and he’d get home and it was all gone and no sign of where it’d gone -- well, sump’n was up, all right.

People need to be putting something aside, gotta take some responsibility for themselves.

Well, it wasn’t but half a day later when his own son calls him and goes through the whole story again. He was a good man, his son tells him. They don’t have any money, he tells him.

Coffins ain’t cheap, he told his son. His son said they were planning to cremate him. He told his son to give him five minutes, he’d think about it. He called this guy he knew and told him the story. The guy couldn’t believe he was even thinking about paying for his ex-wife’s husband’s funeral.

Well, it wasn’t the whole funeral. It wasn’t even the coffin. He just bought the urn. Six hundred dollars.

He figured he could meet ‘em halfway.

__________

The photo at the top of this story is titled “Horses and Bus” © All Rights Reserved, and is posted with the permission of Stephskimo. You can see all Stephskimo’s photos on Flickr here.