Push up, not down

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
-Walt Whitman

Daddy was raised one garden up from Mull Brother’s Grocery where the butcher counter’s blood red meat lay in sharp contrast to the sawdust on the floor.

The small dirt path to Mull’s was worn thin, the pattern of a life well rehearsed, day after day, a rhythm of planting and harvesting and an occasional treat from Mull’s to augment the self-sufficiency that garden represented.

My favorite surprise from Mull’s was always the Frozen Orange Push-Ups; I loved the mechanics of it, that fluted white paper you had to peel off the top, the clear, thin plastic of the push-handle, those wacky dots on the wrapper, the way that pushing up revealed more than just the surface of the treat, the satisfaction and panic of reaching that smooth plastic platform on which the ice cream had rested, a signal that it was gone.

I had to stand tippy-toe to reach the push-ups deep inside the freezer case that smoked when you opened the glass door on top. I was never able to see them, but could only feel around in the cold to find their distinctive shape. Besides the coveted orange push-ups, there were thick, sweet peppermint sticks to counteract the spring onions I pulled up on the way there, a salt shaker hidden in my hand to eat them fresh from the ground. It was a predictable life, a sure one, a steady and simple one.

Summer brought big muscadines, with skins so thick you could squeeze them open, suck out the slippery middle and carry the husk around like a clown’s nose on the tip of your tongue.

Grandpa’s work shed was a refuge from Grandma’s sharp laugh, a place whose quiet and smell remain, though the structure that held them is long gone. In that shed, he made stilts for every grandchild, each of us with our own nickname, bestowed lovingly by him—names that we owned and loved, that made us feel special to him—Tater and Pea Twister, Scooter and Boots. Because of our orange hair, my brother and I were known to him as Rusty and Penny. We each begged to be the one to work the metal bench vise. We felt important holding those well-worn tools, warm with the imprint of his large hand, so tall towering over us.

That shed, light filtering in just one window, sat against a cement wall marking the property’s edge. My older cousins had scared me for years about what was back of that shed: dead people.

And not just any dead people, but crazy ones, they said. The house was built on property that belonged to the state mental institution whose cemetery sat right up against Grandpa’s tool shed, that final resting place for people long thrown away by families, by their kin, by us all. Some, I know now, weren’t insane, but battling addictions or depression or a sadness or a vision that had no place in the world at that time and maybe not even now. Like Uncle Frog.

Uncle Frog was Mama’s brother, a skinny stick of a smoker, a thin-faced and much-loved man who attracted children like the Pied Piper. His name was really Uncle Guy, but we never called him that. He owned a barbecue restaurant for a while and always bought us toys that needed batteries—a bear clanging cymbals together, a donkey extruding cigarettes from its rear end that was given to Granddaddy, to his great delight. I didn’t know it then, but Uncle Frog also drank himself into Broughton Mental Hospital several times over the years; that was his demon.

He was my favorite uncle, with a childlike humor that kids couldn’t refuse: we loved him and didn’t know about the other side of him, that dark, drunk one, the one who lost the barbecue restaurant, who fought, whose tiny wife Tina died of a broken heart, perhaps. What we kids saw instead, was a real person, more real than other adults, more like us, more fun.

In 1976, Uncle Frog had finally turned his life around. He had even gotten a job at a local pool hall as a short order cook. He came to see us the day he got the job, proud to show us the tiny paper hat that he would wear at work, like a sail boat perched on his buzz cut. I couldn’t ever go into the pool hall to see him at work—it was an adult place—but I loved going by there and opening the small sliding window that opened onto the street, just to yell “hi, what’s cooking?” to Uncle Frog. He always leaned out the window and laughed at my young joke. People on their lunch break knew he cooked the best chili-slaw burgers in town and would stop by, slide open the window, and order from the sidewalk while I stood there. I was proud to be associated with him.

One night when Uncle Frog was working, a man pushed up against the counter and shouted “Hey, sailor boy, let me use your phone.”

“Sorry,” Frog turned quickly to answer, then back to his burgers on the grill. “We’re just too busy tonight, Mac,” he explained. “Damn you!” the man yelled, running out.

Ten minutes later when the sliding window opened, Uncle Frog picked up his order pad and walked toward the end of his life, like we all do every minute I guess. He leaned toward the small opening and reached up to grab his ink pen from behind his ear, unprepared for the gun shot that tore his face clean off. The man who needed the phone had come back.

The gun was found on a nearby roof the next morning while Uncle Frog lay without a face in the VA Hospital. He died soon after. Mama spent those few nights by his side, talking to her older brother about pound cake recipes and “As the World Turns.” She wasn’t about to leave him there alone.

I miss Uncle Frog; I could have learned a lot from him as an adult, I think. He’s buried down in Cliffside with all those other brothers and sisters that Mama has buried, along with her mama, her daddy, and the grandparents she never knew. They’re all there, packed underground, immune from the floods, under the watchful eye of that intact moon.

So, you see, the place I was so scared of as a child—that mental hospital—was home to Uncle Frog a few times over the years. I didn’t know that then—perhaps if I had, that place wouldn’t have been so scary to me, knowing and loving someone there. Its cemetery behind Grandma and Grandpa’s house was a place I never went.

Oh, sure, when we’d go see the pigs, I peered through the bushes to make sure my cousin Tater was telling the truth about a cemetery being there, but I never once stepped foot in it. Being that close to the mental hospital’s living inhabitants was scary enough, causing nightmares when we slept over at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Stepping on dead crazy ones was too much to consider.

Only as an adult did I go to the cemetery, taking my husband with me as witness to the childhood I had lived.

As we pulled to a stop, we saw white knee-high posts every few feet in the cemetery, with chain links between them, punctuating the snow.  “I wonder how old the oldest grave is,” I heard John say as we both got out of the car. “Let’s try to find it,” he said.

As we walked toward the rows of posts, we saw thousands of medallions hanging from those chains.

“See how the snow ripples under those chains? It looks like the ocean,” John said. “Wave after wave of dips and swells. Or like a gigantic golf ball, a dimple under each medallion, the  metal’s heat causing the snow to melt, like a physics of memory.”

When we reached the first row of chains, we could see that each chain held several small, engraved metal disks. Pulling one toward me, I looked for the name and those dates that would define their beginning, their end. Who was this person and when did they die? What was their story?

I didn’t find a name.

What I found instead was a number, one of a thousand numbers: 101335, 101336, 101337, 101338. We ran to another row, and another, unable at first to process the fact that appeared in front of us: There were no names; after all, these were interchangeable, replaceable people who had been institutionalized their whole lives. There was nothing remaining of their brief stay here on earth; even their families had sought to erase them, these inconvenient reminders of their own fragility.

We were silenced, there in the snow so near Grandpa’s comforting shed, surrounded by thousands of the nameless dead, their stories muffled not only by the thump of dirt on wood, but long before that—when their lives strayed outside the lines. These are the creative ones, the haunted and silenced ones, the sick ones, the ones we can’t place or face, the ones that if acknowledged might call into question our own sanity, the ones known only by a number.

There are so many people we disregard, discard, dehumanize, aren’t there?—the ones who don’t fit our definition of normal, a definition so shaped by our own way of being in the world, what we treasure, what we believe, what we see from behind our own eyes. Then there are those we see but don’t see—like our hotel room maid or bus driver or prison inmates, the ones who are between—between genders, between here and there, the ones who drink too much—we simply number them as if they are not human. We need to give them names, not numbers; we need to acknowledge that they are in us, we are in them. We need to push them up, not down, to reveal the whole of them.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

I believe that the ones we fear, we fear because they remind us of our own vulnerability or darkness or insignificance. Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

And yet, how easily we number others, while demanding the specificity of names and lives and souls for ourselves.

Close your eyes. Remember your favorite game from childhood—how the pieces felt in your hand, who you played the game with, where you sat while playing. Now remember your secret place, your greatest loss, your first love—really remember them; sit quietly and recall the sense memory that comes into your body when you think of those things. 

Now open your eyes and understand that every single person you meet—the janitor, the shopkeeper, the crossing guard, the transgendered woman, the gay man, the CEO, the maid in your hotel room—each has the same depth of memory, the same richness of experience as you do. They are names, not numbers. Grant them the same specificity you give yourself.

See people as whos, not whats. See them as Uncle Frog, not a drunk; see them as names, not numbers; see them as humans like yourself, not types. Stop asking “what are you?” and ask, instead, “who are you?”