Apparently, the D.A. or the prosecutor liked the story as well.
There is a reason a man or a woman finally tells a personal story some ten or twenty - or
fifty - years later. Of course our memories are quirky things; who knows why we retain what
we do, and why we forget? Obviously, some experiences stay with us forever - first love,
death of a parent, etc. But there are also many experiences which stay with us because they
are unresolved in our minds, because we know there is a story, but its meaning is still unclear.
I have a poem I’ve written called The New Camera about taking a photo with a Polaroid
camera and pulling the negative to the light and waiting not sixty seconds but fifty years for the
exposure to become a clear image. I’m not sure why Gordie chose his story about falling from
the bus, but I imagine there was some irony that stayed with him, the nuns in effect rewarding
him for doing something wrong (hanging onto the back of the bus). But whatever the reason, I
saw in Gordie a good-naturedness, laughing at himself and understanding that our
experiences in youth sometimes entertains us for a long time.
The prosecutor saw it otherwise.
As I said, I was driving home from my office on a beautiful summer afternoon. I was feeling
good because earlier that day I brought several senior citizens whose narratives we published
in a little booklet to a junior high school so they could share their stories and interact with the
students. When eighty year-old Sarah McClellan read her story about bringing the corn to a
gristmill in Mississippi on the back of a mule when she was twelve years old, the students
began asking questions. Sarah's story was about how there was an "advantage” to being a
country girl, no matter how hard the life was or how much fear she had of the snakes in the
branches in the trees she passed under on the mule - because she "knew, I mean knew what
we ate, knew it from the ground that it came from. And we knew what we wore, from the cotton
in our hands to the corn sack made into a party dress.” “Yes, we knew," Sarah added, where
everything we needed came from. It was our world around us, and the hard thing was simply
the respect we gave to our daily bread.”
This was an important story to pass on to a generation whose materialistic needs appeared
magically every day, although I remember the first question from the students following the
story: “How much allowance were you given a week?” Sarah laughed and nodded her head.
“Not a penny,” she replied.
Speaking of money, that’s what got my friend Gordie in trouble - greed!