I need to go back and tell you about my father now. Because I didn’t understand what was happening in that gym any more than Principal Shaw did, and the story only makes sense if you know what I didn’t.
Ron Pfeiffer was born in 1954 on a dairy farm north of Norvik. He was the fourth of six kids. He milked cows before school and after school until he was eighteen, and then he drove a feed truck for the co-op, and then he married my mother, and then he got a job driving bus for the school district in 1986, because the hours fit around the farm and the district had health insurance.
He was going to do it a couple of years.
He did it thirty-eight.
Route Seven was the north county loop. Forty-one miles of gravel and county blacktop. It started at the Hegland place on the far north end of the district and wound down through the river bottoms and the hill farms and came into town from the west side. Thirty-some kids at any given time. Farm kids, mostly. The ones who lived farthest out.
He picked them up at 6:52 every morning. He had them at the elementary school by 7:58. Every day. For thirty-eight years.
I rode his bus from kindergarten through eighth grade. I sat in the third seat on the right. Every kid on Route Seven had an assigned seat, and Dad never wrote it down, he just knew. If you sat in the wrong one, he’d look at you in the big mirror over the windshield and raise one eyebrow, and you’d move.
He didn’t talk much. He had the radio on the AM country station, low. He knew every kid’s name. He knew who had a dog that would chase the bus and who had a mother who would run out at the last second with a forgotten lunch. He knew which kids didn’t have a coat in January, and those kids somehow ended up with one, and nobody ever said how.
He never yelled. Not once in nine years that I rode with him did I hear my father raise his voice on that bus.
I thought it was the most boring job in the world.
I’m ashamed of that now. But it’s true.
When I was in high school, kids would ask what my parents did. My mother was a nurse at the clinic in Fergus Falls. I’d say that first. Then I’d say my dad drove bus. And I’d say it fast, and move on, because I thought a bus driver was something you did if you couldn’t do anything else.
I went to college in Minneapolis. I got a business degree. I work in insurance in St. Cloud. When people in St. Cloud ask what my father does, I’ve said, more than once, “He’s retired from farming.” Which is true. It’s just not the whole truth. It’s the part I thought sounded better.
He never talked about the job. I never asked him to.
So I didn’t know about the fall of 1994.
I was eleven that fall. I was on that bus every morning. I was sitting in the third seat on the right.
And I didn’t even know.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.