And the Bus Driver Listened

“She’s what keeps me going, really,” Sherry, who lost her mother to cancer in 1997, says. “Or I keep her going – I keep her laughing all the time.”

When Jackie called her sister a couple of years back to tell her that she “looked like a dog with mange,” (a result of the chemotherapy) Sherry told her, “Jackie, you know I’ve always been a dog lover.”

And in spite of it all, Jackie had to laugh. Sherry has that effect on people.

“She’s crazy,” Jackie said. “She’s a good girl, but she’s crazy. Her personality is one of the best things she’s got going for her.”

People who know Sherry agree.

Nancy Beaulieu, Tobias’ godmother, said that “Sherry is a very likable person she’s a good people person. She can relate to most people be it a homeless person riding on her bus or a student on the UNCW shuttle – she can talk to anybody.”

Jacky Harts, who drives the express shuttle in the mornings and who has known Sherry for five years, described her as “honest, outgoing, cheerful and witty.”

“She’s always willing to help you do anything you need to do,” Harts said.

Even the students she shuttles back and forth from campus want to spend time with her.

“These kids try to get me to hang out with them can you believe that? They say, “You cool, Miss Sherry.” And I say, “I ain”t that cool.’”

But she is. Despite the abuse she suffered at the angry hands of two husbands, despite the fact that she buried too early the love of her life, despite the loss of both her parents to untimely deaths (her father also died early, in a motorcycle accident in 1985), despite the ever-present specter of cancer growing in her sister’s brain, despite the funerals of aunt, nephew, and mother-in-law she has attended in the last year, despite the seven surgeries she herself has undergone for a kidney ailment that is not yet resolved – despite all of this, Sherry Moreno approaches her life with a grace and charm that most of her passengers lack on their best days. We could all learn something from Sherry Moreno.

Five minutes ahead of schedule, UNCW’s clock tower announces that it is 6:30 and all is well. Night descends in purple velvet as the moon clocks in for its graveyard shift. Sherry rolls her shuttle once more into the Warwick Center parking lot and opens the door for her lone remaining passenger.

“Life is truly what you make it,” she says. “Sometimes it feels like you got a plague on you and everything you go at falls apart. But we have a lot to be thankful for, and a lot of the time we bring our problems on ourselves.”

“Someday I’m going to write me a book. I’m going to call it “And the Bus Driver Listened.””

She certainly has stories enough to tell.