juggling teacups —
cracks in the raku
getting wider
Memory of my moments between 1st and 6th grade is a mare’s nest. Two schools in Wisconsin, one in Maine, and two in Indiana all attempted to program my brain. After flunking the second grade, education perpetually perplexed me, and I found myself inexorably behind my classmates.
Jumping ahead to Halloween season at a Green Township school in Indiana, and our silver-haired teacher drawing math puzzles on the chalkboard — she singled me out to solve a problem. It’s not like I didn’t know how to add and subtract. I couldn’t read the board from the back of the room. She told me to come up and study it. The runes were harder to grasp the closer I got to the board — a newfangled form of division? I only went to that school for two days, so my lack of comprehension proved inconsequential to my ego. Later, I attended another school in Deerfield for one day, another token of the instability in my life.
unbalanced —
the boy on a seesaw
can’t solve the equation
At Pine Tree Memorial School in Freeport, Maine, my spelling was atrocious, math skills mundane. I was an avid reader, though ahead of the class; Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe consumed with a passion only otherwise reserved for recess.
My first crush, even though “crush” wasn’t a word in my vocabulary at the time, was Susan Grover — a pristine, straight-A student — who sat at the desk in front of me.
“Have you ever played with Silly Putty?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s like bubble gum on vitamins. Here, try it.” She handed me the ball of goo — her hand brushing mine as the room stood still. “Don’t eat it.”
That afternoon, we took part in a spelling bee. “Doing, d-o-o-i-n-g,” I was out on the first word, but she won the whole contest. I can see her now in her flowery dress, standing at the front of the class as each contestant fell. The next morning, our teacher said she had something to tell us.
“Susan had trouble breathing last night . . .” My brain turned into a foggy scream. The rest I picked up from other sources after the fact.
As her condition worsened, her parents put her in the car and headed for the hospital. There was a hospital a few minutes from their home. Instead of going there, they drove half-an-hour to the Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Brunswick. They made a conscious decision to go to that hospital based on religion. It’s a top-notch facility, but it served no purpose that night other than to put a tag on Susan’s toe.
On the way to the hospital, Susan’s parents encountered a group of teenagers playing games in a car just in front of them. Swerving across the road, they didn’t let her father pass even though he was honking the horn and flashing the headlights. By the time the family arrived at the hospital, Susan had suffocated. Her funeral was the first I ever attended, my first brush with death, an empty desk in the classroom.
driving a desolate road
tuning the radio
to dead air
Ronny Glover was my closest friend at Pine Tree. We played tetherball together every recess. We rode the same bus and often helped each other with our assignments. The ride home that afternoon was routine.
When we arrived in Brunswick, the driver made his usual stop on Pleasant Street. I was sitting in the front-right seat. Ronny was the first kid to step off the bus. As he passed, we jokingly said our see-you-tomorrows.
Pleasant Street is four lanes wide. The bus stopped in the left-center lane, lights flashing to stop traffic. Ronny disappeared out the door, and then, wham — his body flew 20 or 30 feet, landing in the road in front of the bus. A sports car came to an askew stop in the middle of the intersection.
A disheveled man staggered from the car, over to the sidewalk, and up to the nearest house. We later learned he was drunk. A woman walked into the street and tried to help Ronnie. She wound up laying her sweater over his upturned face. The police arrested the driver, and the paramedics bundled Ronnie’s body onto a stretcher before loading it into the back of the ambulance. The bus stop is across the street from the cemetery where they buried Ronny. His death shook me like a bucket of nails. And there was no one to talk to but God.
King was just another loud thump outside the bus. The driver stopped and told me to get out and take care of my dog. He left me there with a bloody pile of meat on the road. I ran. I ran up to the house, crying. Grandpa cleaned up the mess on the pavement, but no one cleaned up the mess in my head.
a grain of sand
in the corner of my eye
bloody tears
First published in Lit Up on Medium
