Lost and Found

Since I’m on a roll with the blog-as-confessional theme, I’ll tell you another story, one that was brought to mind by a conversation I had recently with an old friend:

Picture a 1930s era brick school building, kids milling about on the blacktop outside, waiting for their rides to appear. Paint (probably lead paint) is flaking from the windowpanes, and there is a large Africa-shaped slab of concrete missing from the foundation on the south side of the building. It’s an early fall afternoon and the summer heat hasn’t broken yet. The school building doesn’t have AC, so everyone is wearing shorts; those who didn’t in deference to fashion are regretting the choice. The blacktop is lined off for 4-square games, and there are a few takers, but mostly people disdain this activity because a) it’s hot as hell and b) the schoolyard has a significant slope, which means that the losers have to chase down stray balls at top speed, and this sucks.

The cool kids—those who haven’t left already—are standing with their backs to the wall of the school, or in the shade of the trees at one end of the blacktop. Everyone else is trying to either get the attention of the cool kids or simply look inconspicuous. There are no adults in sight. Kids get in cars or walk home, without anybody taking much note. On another day, I will get into the car of an older boy I have a crush on (one of the more thrilling events of the year, for me). The day after, a teacher will ask me about this, apparently out of curiosity, for I am not reprimanded and nobody notifies my parents. The police state found in contemporary schools does not yet exist. We are left to our own devices, expected to police ourselves.

On this day, I am 13 years old. I am waiting for the bus to take me to my grandmother’s house, where I will consume chocolate pudding and cable TV, two things not available at home. My mom does not believe in junk food and my dad does not believe in cable TV. We have 3 channels, one being PBS. My friends watch MTV on Friday evenings. I watch Lawrence Welk. This does not bode well for my social life, as anybody (but my parents) could tell.

Suddenly, I hear laughter and shouting, and see a group of kids huddling up in a circle, packed tight around some spectacle. Usually this means a fight. Obeying some deep-seated pack instinct, everyone on the blacktop makes a beeline for the huddle. I am standing on the outside of the circle, but I can see what is happening. I can see who is inside (a kid I’ll call Alex), but it’s not a fight. Alex is in the grade below mine, but he is older than me, having failed several grades. He has some sort of speech impediment, and is fat. He is what we would nowadays call “special needs,” but that is not a term we know. We call him retarded, not necessarily because he is stupid, but because he is crazy, and this word is an excellent catch-all for his freakish qualities. Alex is often goaded into fights because everyone loves to see what he will do. He does not throw punches like other boys—he sort of slaps at his opponent, working himself into a maniacal rage, lurching and leaping and foaming at the mouth until he gets completely tired out, or his opponent walks away, laughing.

On this day, however, Alex is not fighting anyone. Instead, he is dancing. The kids around the circle are clapping and chanting “go Alex, go Alex” and he is obligingly doing something that is a cross between the running man and churning the butter. The other kids toss pennies at him to encourage him to keep it up. I am looking, laughing too. Then I catch Alex’s eye and am ashamed to my very core. Alex knows me, a little. Once, after he failed at least one grade, but before he failed the next, he was in my class, and I gave him part of a fruit roll-up I brought one day for snack. He was nauseatingly grateful and wanted to sit next to me for a long time, which was intolerable. But I had never been actively mean to him. Now I can see that he does not want to be dancing, just as he did not really ever want to fight. I want to say something to the other kids to make them stop. I don’t. I know that the pack can turn, instantly, on another victim. I will experience this myself later that winter, when a classmate will yank my skirt down as I walk into the gym, in front of the entire student body. I have my own problems, but I know already, as Alex does not, that the only way to survive is to keep your head down. This is what I do now. A bus comes and I get on it. I am grateful, later, that I didn’t have any pennies in my pockets, because I might have thrown them.

I was saved the summer of my 9th year, at church camp in Swannanoa. Of the kids from my church, I was the last person to go down to the altar. Even then I was reticent about public displays of any sort, and mostly went down because I didn’t want to make the preacher feel bad. What I remember most about the whole experience is that while praying fervently that God would find the lost sheep, that Heaven would come down and Glory fill my Soul, I ended up breaking my friend Newana’s headband, a blue plastic affair that I had borrowed for the evening. So there I was kneeling with two halves of the headband in my hands, trying to figure out what to do with them. Leave them there? Put them in my pockets? I had just Washed my Robes in the Cleansing Fountain, but I was already feeling that Sin hath left a Crimson Stain on me, all over again.

What I didn’t know then, is that we need saving from ourselves not just once, but over and over again. We need that amazing grace, not just once, but many times. I was lost, but now I’m found. Then I got lost again, and got found again. And again. And again. It’s the process of losing our faith in everything, perhaps, that makes finding it again more powerful, more beautiful, more redemptive.

I was in Wal-Mart the other day, picking up a few odds and ends, and was just about to walk out the door, when suddenly somebody tapped me on the shoulder. It was Alex. “Hey,” he said, handing me a bottle of Children’s Motrin that I’d accidentally left in my cart, “they forgot to scan this one.” I took it from him, and the cashier rang it up. As I paid, Alex smiled at me. He actually looked pretty ok, aside from the fact that two of his front teeth were missing. I could tell he didn’t remember me. “I just wanted to save you from that alarm. I hate that damn thing.” And then he walked out the door. There’s no ending to the story, really. But it looked like maybe he was found, too. I hope so, I really do. For his sake, and for mine.