Writer’s Notebook Shameful moment

By Steve Orr

PLEASE IGNORE THIS PIECE. IT WAS PUSHED TO YOU IN ERROR. IT HAS BEEN REVISED, AND THE REAL PIECE IS TITLED "INCIDENT AT 10TH AND CLARK". THANKS, STEVE

In less than 60 seconds we went from wild cacophony to utter silence.

Welcome to Jetton Junior High School, spring 1964. There were a couple hundred of us; talking, shouting, laughing, nudging, arguing, courting, playing; and our keepers were ever watchful to ensure the arguments or the games of “slap-hands” didn’t escalate into actual fighting, that the courting didn’t cross that indefinable (at least to us) line into public-display-of-affection, that the laughter wasn’t somehow connected to something salacious. We were, all of us, keepers and kept, fully engaged in our after-lunch rituals, using up the time until the next class bell rang and called us back into the building for additional societal formation. It was a warmer-than-usual spring day and we were a bit more rambunctious than the norm, perhaps sensing in the air the coming of summer and our annual parole from public education.

All of that, that activity, the keeping; it all just stopped. Though not abruptly. There was a definite fading process that seemed to take forever but that really only lasted, at most, a minute. I’ve gone over and over this, and after several years I can confidently say it took about a minute to go from thunderous noise to something so silent I can find no analog in my other memories with which to compare it.

Oh, how those minutes weigh on me, even now in my fifth decade since it occurred. I’ve done some bad things in this life (and haven’t we all?), some things of which I am ashamed; but this particular moment, this sticks with me, rises up from the lake of my memory time and again like nothing else. No amount of wishing or hoping will make it go away. My memory refuses to let me lose this one. It looms so large in my reflections that I count it among those things I mean when I repeat (as I do more and more these latter days) David’s petition to God in the Psalms: “Remember not the sins of my youth.”

The first thing I noticed was the change in the sound. Somewhere out along the farthest edges of our crowd, near the street, sound had stopped. I’ve always been a sound person, probably because my vision is so poor. I was in thick glasses by the time I entered the third grade and have lost some ground every year since. So, by the time I arrived at this shameful moment I was already to the point I could not safely walk down the hall of our junior high school without my glasses.

Yet, that day, I could see well enough to go along with everyone else. And I could easily recognize the change in the quality and volume of our massed sound.

I was up on the large and grand porch that fronted our school and about as far from what happened as I could be and still be part of it. I say “large and grand” because our school had, at one time, been the largest and grandest of our town’s three high schools. One of many changes wrought by Brown v Board of Education was the consolidation of all the high schools into the newest facility, located way out around 25^th Street.

I remember turning away from my friends and looking towards the street. In my recollection I was the only person anywhere near me who, initially, noticed what was happening out at the street edge. My two good friends stood next to me, absorbed in a common exercise; taking turns trying to slap each other’s hands before said hands could be jerked away, and, supposedly, out of harms way. It was an interesting, and often painful, lesson in eye-hand coordination that many boys around my age participated in; the more aggressive among us getting to hit something, while the rest of us learned to get out of their way. One of those excellent life lessons one learns outside the classroom.

What I saw when I looked toward the street was not completely without precedence; my fellow students—friends, enemies, acquaintances, strangers—pausing to look at something passing by our school; usually an automobile of some sort. We were situated right on a sometimes busy, divided street; one of the reasons our keepers were so adamant about our never leaving school property; there was the actual chance one could come to harm just by stepping off the curb and into the street. This rule was tested from time to time, and, if the miscreant was caught, he (and wasn’t it always “he”?) was quickly collared by one of the teachers, fully empowered by “in loco parentis,” and dragged off for a brief and meaningful conference with the Principal.

In my memory this moment seemed to take a long time; but, in reality, it could have only been seconds before I refocused from the first wave of watchers to what they were watching. I remember raising my eyes, seeing first the line of cars parked along the curb in front of the school, then to the single lane of street that was located closest to us, then to the wide, grassy berm which made it possible for simple 10^th Street to also be called Murrell Boulevard (since renamed to Walter Jetton Boulevard), then to the other lane which allowed traffic to drive in the opposite direction. In all that, I saw nothing. No passing cars, no bicycles, no one walking … nothing that should draw their attention away from all those things we thought were so important in those days.

But then my eyes finished their rise, and I saw the old man.

He was walking along the opposite sidewalk. Tall, thin, not-recently-shaven; wearing one of those sleeveless undershirts with the scoop neck, a pair of grey, shapeless pants that had been washed too often or had lain too long in the Salvation Army bin, of both, leather shoes that had seen better days, no socks. It was possible he could have been coming from almost anywhere. Our school sat on the corner of 10^th and Clark, only ten streets from the riverfront. There was a lot stuffed into that quarter of the city. My grandparents lived in a rent house not quite a block-and-a-half up Clark Street—I often stopped by to see them on school afternoons before walking the mile and a half home—but I think I would have known him if he was a friend of theirs, and I did not. Across the alley from my grandparent’s place, and at mid-block on Washington Street, was the local house of ill-repute; but that also seemed an unlikely source for the old man (Yes, I know … block-and-a-half from a junior high school … what can I say? Different place. Different time.). Directly across Washington from there was the back entrance to the Southern Bell Telephone Company where my mother worked; another unlikely starting point. The Andrew Carnegie Public Library? No.

These speculations were very brief; none of those fit the situation. Besides, we could all tell where he came from. It was obvious, obvious to us at least; he had just come from the small grocery store located a couple blocks nearer the river, on Clark near the intersection with 8^th Street. He was carrying a low-sided cardboard box (the kind you sometimes see on grocery store shelves with half a soup can showing above the cut-down cardboard edge) with three half-gallons of milk and a loaf of bread in it. That seemed to end any speculation about the origin of his journey that day. And, just as obvious to us all, he was taking these to his home. Anyone would have come to the same conclusions.

Carrying is not the right word. He was laden with that low-sided box and its content. From his slow, wobbly gate it was easy for anyone to see he had more than his ancient limbs could handle. Each step was a struggle. And even from my well-removed position, and with my bespectacled eyes, I could see the thin, ropey muscles of his arms starkly etched against the parchment of his skin. Here was a man who, clearly, had done a lot of what my grandfather called real work. Grand-daddy still labored at the Illinois Central Railroad Roundhouse, as he had all of his adult life (except for a two-year span during the depression when the whole family lived on his parents’ farm and he earned only $1.50), and he often told us he was pretty sure he knew what real work was. But we all grow infirm, don’t we, even those who have built up some muscle though hard work?

By this time, my friends had stopped to see what I was looking at; and thus began the slow domino into silence. Instead of moving toward us in waves, the silence moved both from us and from the street side to eventually meet somewhere in the middle of the crowd. In less than a minute all of us—friends, enemies, acquaintances, strangers; teachers and students, keepers and kept—were standing perfectly, silently still … watching.

To say the old man struggled would be to use too light a word. “Struggled,” “wrestled,” even “fought”; we’ve managed somehow to leech the weight and power out of these words. All that’s left me, that truly describes these events, is “battle.” That day we witnessed a man battle; battle against his own body with all the ferocity of a soldier attempting to overtake the enemy’s position amid a barrage of weapons fire. He gave it his all with each wavering step, knees slightly bent against the weight of his burden, determination painted in rivulets of sweat coursing down on his face.

I don’t think any of us was shocked when the first milk carton tumbled.

We had already stopped moving and talking; there was nothing else to stop except breathing. I’m pretty sure we all did that, too; I know I did. Again, it all seemed to move in some sort of horror-film-slow-motion; the corner of the box buckling just a little, the milk carton starting to tip over the edge, the old man reactively tugging everything up and thus causing the falling carton to start a slow end-over-end spin as it floated out of the box and toward the sidewalk. Kurosawa and Peckinpah could have taken lessons. I suddenly found myself leaning against the thick, sculpted concrete balustrade that kept us “porch kids” from tumbling into the broad array of hedges growing about a half story below. And I was not alone. Everyone was not just oriented on the old man; we were leaning toward him as we watched that carton of milk … oh … so … slowly … somersault toward the sidewalk. Reality: mere seconds. Subjectively: almost forever.

It hit with a slapping sound we all could hear.

And … nothing happened. The carton landed on its bottom, with no apparent harm to its contents. Everyone breathed. The moment of horror had passed. The relief that flooded though us was so strong, so palpable. Everything was A-O-K.

Then, as we were just beginning to think of returning to our previous activities, the old man moved to pick up the errant milk carton … and the second carton began its tumble from the box.

Stephen King fans will recognize this as a “Cujo moment”; that moment when (the good guys having finally won the day and realizing they have somehow survived, a moment of abject and profound relief) evil surges back for another bite! Long before I ever read Stephen King, long before I ever saw one of those just-can’t-kill-the-bad-guy movies, I experienced this horror. Right then I knew. Deep in the inmost place of my being I was forced to recognize truth: he was not going to make it. I wanted him to make it, but I had already come to the conclusion that he just could not do it. How does a man who has difficulty just walking pick up a carton of milk without dropping the rest of his load?

This time the top of the carton struck the concrete sidewalk. Milk spewed in every direction. By this time, the old man was kneeling on one knee. Milk splattered his feet, his legs, his shirt; a few drops hit him in the face. But back then we were a resolute lot, especially people of his generation. He soldiered on. He had lived through some of the more trying times of history; World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Korea. Even my generation had been taught what to do in such a situation this: no crying over spilt milk. And he didn’t cry. He passed his hand over his face, wiping away the few droplets of milk there. He reached for the first, upright milk carton, placed it back in the box, and then slowly, carefully managed to raise himself back to a standing position without further crisis.

He resumed his slow, unsteady shuffle; not looking back at his failure, leaving it behind him in the way we had all been taught. In all this time, this subjective time of our viewing, he had not taken as much as 15 steps. Now, he resumed putting one foot before the other, wobbly but resolute. One step. Two. Three.

I’m not sure what actually happened. Maybe the first milk carton had sustained some damage when it landed upright on the sidewalk and had sprung a slow leak only after being returned to the box. Maybe all of his efforts had just exhausted the man. Whatever the cause, whether liquid-weakened cardboard or life-weakened sinews, on his sixth step away from the milk spill the box caved in the middle. This time it happened very fast. The two sides of the box flipped up to meet each other in the middle. Somehow in that process the bread and surviving milk cartons flew forward from the old man’s grasp. And he did grasp, at all of it. He actually got one hand on one of the cartons, but it slipped right through, perhaps already slick from leaking milk.

In a flash, chaos. Before him on the sidewalk were two burst milk cartons; a loaf of bread split open and sopping wet with milk, one of the cartons having landed directly on it before spilling and soaking the loaf. And now … now while grasping the folded and useless piece of cardboard … now the old man cried.

And through it all we watched.

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[WRITER'S NOTEBOOK - What follows is not the story; rather it is my angst-y analysis of the events that day and our lack of response to the man's situation. Please feel free to skip all of this. Writing the piece allowed me to explore some deeply held anxieties about that day, feelings I have since worked through, thanks to the encouragement of my friends. I think the story stands on its own; it certainly doesn't require any of this to be engaging and thought-provoking all on its own.] And there it is; the thought that will not leave me alone. I should have gone to his aid. I should have called out to someone—friends, enemies, acquaintances, strangers—located at street’s edge: “Go! Help him!” I should have implored a teacher for … something; permission? I should have done something. Someone should have done something … right? But on this day no one left school property.

With decades of life from which to look back at this moment, I have come to realize that, even with the minutes it took for this tableau to unfold, I probably could not have moved from where I stood, even at a run, to reach his side in time to be of help; at least not from the time the first carton hit the sidewalk, the time when I concluded he was not going to make it. There was just not enough real time in which to act. But, someone located just across the street could have. I’m certain of it. But I not only failed to act, I failed to urge anyone else to act.

But there is a worse thought, pecking away at me like I am Prometheus’ liver: why didn’t I do something the moment I first laid eyes on the old man? It was obvious he was in trouble. He was battling with every step; something we could all see. What chain kept me? Why did I not act?

I clearly recall that the rules required me to stay on school property. Up to that point in my life I had had a somewhat flexible relationship with rules. Oh, I was, at my core, a compliant personality type. It was a rare instance where my parents had to punish me twice for the same infraction. I really did tend to learn from my mistakes. But, in all honesty, there were plenty of rules I regularly ignored when it suited me. This tended to take the form of not asking permission to do things when I was pretty sure permission would be denied; like riding my bicycle in downtown traffic to visit “Readmore,” our town’s only bookstore and newsstand. Don’t get the impression Paducah was like Mayberry. There were 50,000 plus souls about; with all that implies. The potential for trouble really did exist. Still, I rode my bike all over the town, and some parts of the county, whenever I wished. I just didn’t tell anyone who might stop me from doing so. On another front, I was always getting into trouble at the public library for sneaking upstairs to read the grown-up books when the rules clearly stipulated people of my age were restricted to reading books in the Juvenal section. I was eventually banned from the library for this practice, but that is a story for another time. I also had had, up to then, a rather lax attitude toward the completion of homework assignments. So, in my world, there were rules and then there were rules.

What had changed was that I had decided in the 7^th grade that I was responsible for me; that if I was to become anything in this life, it would be up to me to see that I did so. And the way that decision impacts on this tale is that I had come to a point where I was reevaluating my relationship to rules. Even in the few short months I had been in the 7^th grade I had observed the difference between how rule followers and rule breakers were regarded by the teachers and administrators. Clearly, there was some value to be mined from following rules. And that was the clear dilemma weighing on me that day as the old man fought, and lost, his battle with his aging body.

I was afraid. I was afraid what might happen to me if I broke the stay-on-school-property rule. Fear kept me from acting. Should I have disregarded the rule and acted to help my fellow human being who was in such obvious distress? Could I have? The memory of time is subjective. The saying goes, “History is the daughter of time.” I would add that memory is the daughter of want. I want to believe that any action on my part would have been too late to have helped the old man. But, honestly, even if that is truth, I never even took one step in that direction. I never moved. I could have, at the very least, moved from where I was rooted by my fear, down the steps, along the walkway, and out to the street edge. No rules would have been broken. I would have still been on school property. But I didn’t even do that much. I didn’t even try.

Perhaps you are kind and are willing to think, “Well, you were just a boy of 12. Really, what could you do?” Or perhaps you are willing to recognize the wisdom in a collection of rules designed to protect teens and pre-teens who have been entrusted to the public school system. Those rules, as we now know, really do have value, and provide some real protections to our children. Perhaps you would ask me, "What would you have wanted your own daughter to have done in that situation?"; knowing full well such a question would lead me to only one conclusion.

I’ve thought all those things … and more. Still, I can’t let it go. In some very real ways, I am who I am because of a few pivotal moments in my life. This is one of those moments that defines me. Since that moment, one that has imprinted me with a deep and everlasting shame, I have struggled (perhaps even battled) with what to do when I see (hear, learn of, sense, recognize) someone in need. Is it a situation in which I can help? Or, is it one in which my actions will be of no impact, or be too late to be of any real help?

What I would like to think (and what I truly believe) is that, because of this moment where I stood and did nothing when someone really needed help, I have since chosen, more times than not, to act, even if my rational mind counseled that my actions would be too late or of no useful impact.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes, “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, when our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” I take some comfort in that passage. I would like to think that God has used that shameful moment to grow me, to develop in me a concern for others that has the capacity, at least, to act on their behalf even when it seems a wasted effort; to, when needed, cast aside my fear and do what I know is right.