A few months after the incident with poor Judy Burnette, I started my last year of elementary school, grade 7. I was appointed a safety patrol because of my good grades, I was one of six. We got to direct traffic and help the younger kids onto the buses and all that kind of stuff. We also got to go on a long weekend train trip to Washington DC and New York City. We saw all the touristy stuff in DC and went to the Smithsonian and then on to New York City where we went to the top of the Empire State Bldg (the tallest in the world at that time) and ate at something called an “automat”
That was the year I learned about something I knew but in a very different way.
One of my fellow safety patrols was a girl named Lynde Worley, we were friends, sometimes she would walk home from school with me. I seem to remember we “made out” once. Lynde mostly kept to herself but she did mention some fights with her mother.
Lyndes House
Just after graduation Lynde sat in a chair in her living room while her mother was at work. She put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.My parents kind of isolated me from the whole thing, I didn’t even know when her funeral was much less attend it. I knew death from being a hunter, I knew what it meant but I didn’t know the psychological aspects of it. but I found out.
I had a little brother, 3 years younger, named Jay. He too made good grades, was a smart kid but he was sick a lot. From about my fifth grade year he spent a lot of time in the hospital, I always just figured they would make him well eventually and that would be that. That summer I learned that Jay had something called “Leukemia”. There was no internet but we did have libraries and I went and looked it up and realized what it meant.
About a month later I was at my grandparents house while my parents were spending the nights at the hospital with Jay. they came in very early one morning, around 4 AM. I remember my mother and father were crying and she told my grandmother that Jay had died.
It was the only time I had ever seen tears in my old mans eyes.
I remember very vividly the feeling, I was relieved. I had seen the devastating effects of the chemo and radiation therapy and I had seen my little brother suffer enormously, I knew he would suffer no more.
To this day that feeling has never really changed. I never felt guilty about it. Sure I was sad but I was sad for me because I missed him.
My life went on.
3 Responses
your story made me cry. you got a good heart mike. Im proud to call you a friend.
Mike: This has been a great series. And, I understand the compulsion to revisit the places where you became you. Last Christmas, my wife and I were back in the town where we grew up, met and married. After dropping her off at her mother’s house, about 20 miles from where my parents now live, I took a stroll through my past – driving through the now decaying heart of an old city built on steel mills and auto parts; down to the first house I bought out of college in the ghetto ($700 down on a $13,000 house I bought at a VA auction, and shared with a buddy from college; yes, we were two white guys in a bad part of town, but we were young enough to treat it like an adventure and I later sold it for $19,000); then to the house my wife and I lived in when we got married and finally to the house I grew up in. Things change, some for the worse and some for the better, but the trip brought back years of memories.
Coming from you BT that is high praise.
The thing is that that little Saturday afternoon ride had a powerful impact on my memory, and my thoughts and I just had the need to write about it, so I did.
It has been said that before you die your whole life plays before your eyes and Im starting to believe that is true. It doesn’t play in an instant though, you remember it in bits and pieces as you get older until finally you have remembered it all.