Author’s Note: Since we picked up several new readers and need a bit of a palette cleanse after the last post, I thought I’d share a story that I’ve shared a few times here but in greater depth.
On the first day of first grade, I failed a basic placement test due to a panic attack —I thought the questions were all tricks— and was sent to a class for special needs students called Chapter One. This was another one of those “most formative experiences of my life” situations. The Chapter One classroom was situated in the basement level of the school next to stuff like the janitor’s closet and a scary dimly lit bathroom almost everyone was too afraid to use. Out of sight, out of mind.
I remember the regular first grade teacher walking a group of us down there. Me and two other boys, if I recall. She seemed way too nice. Spoke really slowly. Then she’d repeat herself, waiting for us to respond. I don’t think I said a word.
Finally, she handed us off to the Chapter One teacher, who was a mean old guy working a few more years until he could retire. He nodded at all of us, gave a brief inspection, showed us to our assigned desks, and waited for the regular first grade teacher to leave before putting a dip of chewing tobacco into his bottom lip and opening a newspaper at his desk. He set a girl named Luisa, who was a veteran of Chapter One, to watch the door and warn him if any adults were coming by. There was no such place as Chapter Two. In Chapter One, you remained at the beginning for the rest of your life.
I felt like crying.
So, I thought, I’m retarded.
It made a sort of sense. The way I would say things and people would look at me like I was so peculiar. Or ask questions that my mom would laugh at and tell me that I wasn’t making sense. It all had a sudden, easy explanation. I was retarded. No wonder I could never do anything right and my parents were always upset. It was to be expected. That’s what happens when you’re retarded.
The Alpha of Chapter One, a giant fourth grader named Stewart who had one eye, came up to the new group of us and here’s where I promise this post is taking a turn for the positive… he sat down across from the group of us and took out his glass eye and spun it along the ground and by mime showed us that we should pick it up and spin it back to him. There were only a few brand new kids but we each took a turn. When I picked it up I remember being surprised that glass eyes weren’t big spheres but looked like weird bowls or rounded out trefoil hats.
It made me really nervous to touch his glass eye. After all, he had just given me something that normally went in his head. When Stewart saw me freeze in picking up his eye he leaned forward and opened the eyelid so I could look into the hollow. There was no gaping wound like I’d imagined. Just a hollow spot.
“It’s okay,” he said.
I think he meant to say that his eye wasn’t hurt anymore.
It’s okay to be retarded is what I felt.
The absurdity of the situation overwhelmed me. I was worried about all these things, the social response to my diagnosis from the other students, the parental response, what my whole future would look, and all Stewart wanted to do was show the hole in his head and tell me it was okay.
I laughed.
We spun his glass eye back and forth on the ground a few times. We all laughed.
Stewart introduced me to another kid named Jesse whose skull had never fused together. Jesse instructed me how to pet his skull so that I could feel it was still soft in several areas. It had something like the feel of those nature videos you watch of gorillas eating bugs out of each other’s hair. Jesse could barely talk but his sounds were soft and gentle. It was the same sort of message as from Stewart. He trusted all of us not to do anything dangerous to the soft spots on his skull. We were part of his group. We were all the retarded kids, together. We had to trust each other.
It’s okay to be retarded.
Nathan, who wore monochrome sweat pants and sweatshirts every day and once had a piece of pepperoni stuck to him for a week and nobody else noticed, was the class clown. Whenever the teacher wanted us to do anything, Nathan took it as his ultimate responsibility to do it the most wrong. Wrong in a way that would demand that an adult come and pay attention to him. Wrong beyond the levels of a retarded kid. Like using a pair of scissors in his hands backwards while holding them over his eyes wrong. When the teacher couldn’t tune out and go back to chewing tobacco and reading his newspaper he’d grow increasingly frustrated and Nathan would continue to play with his emotions, doing whatever it was even more wrong, until the teacher would flip out, cancel the assignment, and then leave us all alone again. It was the height of comedy and we all knew he did it on purpose. The only one who didn’t seem to know this was the teacher.
We got our own recess. Premium access to all the toys on the playground. Nobody there to bother us. It was called the retarded kids recess.
We had our own table at lunch. There was a special retarded kids lunch table, and a group of natal first grader cool girls tried to take it over. Stewart charged to the forefront to defend our sacred and ancient territorial rights. The table closest to the playground door had been the retarded kids’ lunch table forever. He took out his glass eye and threw it down the table. Then he opened his empty socket and showed it to them. They left, screaming and crying.
We all took our luxurious, wide open spots at our long table and feasted like kings on gross cafeteria food. Sometimes older kids would take pity on us and give us nice things to snack on as if to say “I’m sorry you’re retarded, I didn’t do anything to not be retarded, this has all sorts of implications for our futures I can’t resolve, but I am able to give you a Twinkie so here is my Twinkie.” The only bad part was the sad looks.
I’m a quiet person by nature. Nobody forced me to talk. It never became obvious to anyone that I wasn’t actually learning disabled and that if I had any disabilities at all they were entirely emotional. Chapter One was the first time in my life I felt like I could relax. There was nothing left to worry about or have anxiety over. I was retarded and that meant I had a kind of freedom from expectation. To be honest, it was wonderful.
Nobody at my house realized this was going on for something like three days. Nobody cared to ask. I didn’t volunteer the information. I was enjoying every day at school, thoroughly.
Eventually, it all ended and I was re-tested due to the social stigma my moms felt at the idea of having a retarded child. When they asked me to write a capitol M this time I was allowed to make sure it wasn’t a trick and they weren’t really asking for a state capital that started with an M because I didn’t know how to write Montpelier almost at all. They really just wanted me to write a capitol M, so I did, still not quite sure this wasn’t all a trick. And then when they asked me the math questions I was able to double and triple check and make sure they weren’t secretly expecting more complicated stuff that wasn’t part of the question and that I should have inferred through other study. In my life up to that point, I understood that if something was easy it was almost certainly a trick and probably a mean one.
I returned to the regular classroom for regular classes with the regular teacher. Totally boring. I remember I got through all of our little workbooks well before the school year was over and the teacher not knowing what to do because no one had ever done that before. I only got to see Stewart in passing in the hall and he seemed to take my return to the normal kids’ room in stride. Same with the others. I wasn’t retarded, had never been retarded, and would no longer be part of the retarded kids. Their recess and lunch table were now forbidden to me.
If this sounds maudlin or forlorn it’s not meant to be.
Life gives you little memories and experiences like this and you have to be present and fully inhabit them. That’s what the whole thing is about. You get to go out, live, and have bewildering, exhilarating, hilarious experiences. And you never get to know exactly what is going to happen before it does. But there are secrets about this all is and what it all means to be gleaned if you’re careful and take the time to appreciate what is in front of you.
Nobody in that room, had any reason to be nice to anyone else apart from their own personal preference. It was about the lowest status game you could ever be involved in outside of a prison. You didn’t really have anything to lose or to gain. But a fourth grader with one eye and a severe learning disability took it upon himself to be kind to the new kids who showed up. A kid who was so vulnerable his brain was only protected by some cartilage and skin found it inside himself to trust other children to put their hands on his head and be gentle. A kid who really couldn’t do schoolwork very well would on purpose do it even worse just to make his friends laugh.
I confess for a longer while than I’m proud of I bought into the idea that if you’ve been hurt once you’ve been hurt forever. Except life is rude and keeps intruding with all sorts of things that don’t match the character of whatever theme you’re trying to stretch over it to bundle it altogether. Joy is among those things. So is healing. We sometimes become determined that no, we will not abandon one hurt to risk another, but God sneaks in at the edges to surprise us.
I never thought I would get married or have a child. For a long while, all I wanted to do was have a quiet job and read books. Couldn’t possibly risk being like my parents. There is some grand mystery to the universe and I wanted to contemplate it for the rest of my days. The thought of being around strangers generally terrified me. I went to therapy for a bit and worked on it. Little by little, crack by crack, life found its way back in and I met someone, got married, and in the time since I knew my son was coming I’ve doubled my income.
Whatever it is that happened, it can be okay again. Whatever else is true about the universe right here and now this is what you’ve got. If you are willing to risk putting down an old hurt to open yourself to new hurts then joy will find you. There is a pernicious instinct that tells us we are fools to risk such things and yet we are barely alive if we do not. I believe living well might be the only real mystery in the universe.
You’ ll get a lot of opportunities if you listen and watch to observe people doing something they love for no other reason than that they love it. One of those people will be you. We’re a lot better, most of the time, than we give ourselves credit for. It’s a bit like how light shines on through darkness, not because it beats back or fights or even has to win over the darkness. Darkness is an absence, not a substance. I think the same is true of joy, or laughter, or love. All good things have to do in order to beat out bad things is to be good things.
This is mostly a substack about what I hope for the future of our republic and civilization and sometimes even humanity. I do, however, like to remember that being human comes first. If we can’t be human, there’s nothing worth saving.
This is a moving, deep, and well-executed piece. Many thanks.