He covered his mouth.
That was the exact moment almost everyone around me started crying.
Mr. Walter stood there in his old jacket and work pants, one hand over his face, his thermos hanging forgotten in the other. I do not think he understood how many people had come until the applause kept going and going and going.
The principal walked up first and shook his hand, but Mr. Walter barely managed to nod.
Then the children swarmed him. Each one wanted to hand him a card, hug his arm, or tell him happy birthday before somebody else did.
Ben reached him early with his own card and said, very seriously, “I didn’t want you to feel forgotten.”
Mr. Walter bent down as much as he could and hugged him.
Then the older kids came.
Then parents.
Then adults who had once been children on his bus.
One after another, they showed him the cards he had written years earlier. His own shaky handwriting had been saved all that time by people who had never forgotten what it felt like to be remembered by an adult who did not have to care.
Over and over, in a broken voice, he kept saying the same thing.
