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To
Luby Small’s Delight
I need not wish for Luby Small to rest in
peace, because he never, ever gave anything to The World That We Share other
than peace, among many other gifts that we folks may often only fantasize of
giving.
My father met Luby’s dad, Mr. Small, back when
our family lived in Augusta, Maine. Mr. Small was some manner of co-worker
with my dad, as well as a pal. The two guys kept up a relationship after our
family moved down to Portland. Mr. Small probably needed help with a
CPA-related thing, and my dad, always with the eye for service work for a
friend, put my mom, baby Charles, and me into the VW, and we rode the fifty-odd
miles north to Waterville, where resided the Small family.
We got there, parked the VW, rang a bell, and
walked up a couple short flights of stairs. On the second floor, there were the
accustomed pleasantries between the adults. I tried to scope it all out. At my
age of about eight years, I had mostly seen house-type homes. A walk-up
apartment, within which a whole family dwelled, was new to me. Surely, any new
environment is something which is to mentally process and quickly adapt. I felt
an immediate warmth and comfort. It smelled nice there.
For
me to assimilate next, of course, were the New People. We had been met by Mr.
and Mrs. Small, and by their daughter, Jean, in their kitchen. Jean was in her
early teens, to me, a lot like another adult. She introduced herself, and she
gave me a warm, confident smile that put me at ease. She and her parents used
little effort to make us four Chandlers feel welcome. I happily accepted a
glass of ginger ale - with ice cubes in it - out of the Smalls’ homespun
kindness, via their refrigerator.
After the pleasantries and my ginger ale, Mrs.
Small and my mom left the kitchen to bond as women and to change Charlie’s
diaper. My dad and Mr. Small plonked out their paperwork on the kitchen table.
Jean took my hand and beamed, “Let’s go play with Luby.”
On the ride up to Waterville, my folks had told
me that there was a kid around my age, named Luby, at the Smalls’ house and
that I’d have a playmate. My thoughts danced. Throughout my young life, I had
experienced, other than with cousins, only short, transient relationships with
boys and girls my own age. Circumstance, not my adults, was responsible for
this, but over my eight years, person to person, place to place, time to time,
lives and deaths, I hadn’t gotten much of a grasp of permanence. New
friendships, to my young mind, were always welcome, yet I figured them
fleeting, and that others did too. Still, I was excited to meet this Luby.
Jean, I could see, was far more sophisticated than me, yet, from what I knew of
girls, I was sure she’d rather play with dolls than to go in for my car, gun,
action style of play, as I imagined Luby would.
Jean and I turned from the apartment’s short
hallway into the family room, and the floor was somehow, neatly, cleanly,
strewn with lots of basic toys and lots of books for kids to read and more
books of puzzles and crayons and pencils and pads of paper and boxes of jigsaw
puzzles. It wasn’t a mess. It looked like it all belonged right where it was.
“Luby!” Jean called, “Michael is here!”
Luby bounded awkwardly out of his bedroom toward
me in his pajamas. He was pie-eyed with excitement to meet me.
“Hi,
Michael!” and he wrapped his arms around my far shorter shoulders.
I was taken quite aback, and, I must admit,
somewhat frightened. Luby was severely mentally challenged, due to hydrocephalus,
what used to be referred to as “water on the brain.” His head was huge, his
body gangly, developed to hold his head up. His smile sprang from his face in
an unabashed way that I had never experienced. He looked like drawings I had
seen of Humpty Dumpty. He towered over me, and he expressed far more immediate
affection toward me than any of my grandmothers, great-aunts, or kissy, elderly
neighbor ladies could ever muster. I cast a nervous glance at Jean. She beamed,
saintly. Luby released me.
“Do you wanna play?” he asked, indicating the
piles of stuff on the floor.
“Yeah, let’s play,” Jean answered for us all.
What a cruel trick my parents had played on me,
setting me up in my child’s imagination for a new playmate. I was their rube.
They had brought me up on this damn car ride to shunt me off while they did
their adult things, onto a type of person that I wondered if they’d have
invited over to their house. What a gyp!
“Okay,” I answered.
Play we three did, and challenging, mentally
stimulating play. Jean was intelligent, patient with us boys, gentle,
encouraging, engaging, and that, to my youthful heartstrings, made her all the
more pretty.
Luby was fascinating. For all the toys and
puzzles and books, which I knew for a fact he had played with again and again,
each one seemed brand new to him. He showed me and shared with me each one with
openness and originality. Did we play!
Jean
and I read aloud, to Luby Small’s delight. We all three played with cars and
trains and the jigsaw puzzles. We built blocks, and until that afternoon,
wooden blocks as a childhood recreation were beneath me. I learned. I didn’t
learn about the complexities of reading words or those of toy cars and trains
and building blocks, but I learned of simplicity. Between us three, there was
no disparity. We were equals. What one lacked was shared for all by another.
I kept looking into Luby’s face and eyes and
comportment to see or to perceive something; I knew not then, what. It was
obvious that Jean had some of whatever that “what” was. She radiated it, and I
somehow knew she had gotten it from Luby. It was a purity, an innocence, a
transmitted, transmittable comfort. It was a unifying, underlying ease. It was
contagious. It filled the room, the heart, the mind, the soul. It was even in
the toys and the puzzles and the books.
The adults said it was time for lunch, so we
all had sandwiches and some more ginger ale together, and Jean played a few LP
record sides that straddled everyone’s generational difference. Music. Harmony
was among us all, kids and grown-ups polarized atmospherically by Luby. Nobody
among the eight of us was the center of attention.
After
lunch, it was time for the Chandlers to depart the Smalls’ home and Waterville,
Maine, but not for good. We visited their place a few more times, and I hope we
all experienced the same human magic that was present the first time. I know I
did.
I have been of the mindset to try, in childhood
and adulthood, to replicate a formative experience, but nobody in my life could
do it like Luby. It was always like the first time we met. The Small family got
us up to some lakeside cottage that they had rented for a long weekend one
summer, and Mr. and Mrs. Small taught me how to eat and enjoy a lobster. Luby’s
and my wading around among the minnows and the reeds was as original, as fun,
and as memorable to me as any of our times together. We played and played and
laughed and laughed and talked and talked.
A few years later, having not seen the Smalls
during that time, and things being what they are in our societal lack of true
appreciation of our friends and neighbors, we got a telephone call.
Luby had been riding in the school bus reserved
for special people. There weren’t too many convenient roads linking towns in
the Great State of Maine, so the bus was making a short, daily trip on the
Interstate. Sitting across the aisle from the driver was Luby, being his
gregarious, innocent, chatty self. The chain broke on a lumber truck in front
of the school bus, and a long two-by-four smashed through the windshield and
lanced Luby into his delicate, oversized, dear, dear cranium. It did not pierce
either his heart or his soul. Luby lingered, comatose for several days, and I
do believe that this was his penultimate gift to his loved ones.
His final gift was given at least to me, and I
hope, several others.
We
drove back up to Waterville, just me, mom, and dad, for Luby’s wake. I had been
to several such ceremonies, so I walked immediately to his open casket, not out
of curiosity, or anger, or grief, or a notion of loss, not to see, but only to
be. Just like Luby.
I knelt, and I looked into his face and his
being, searching for what he had, just like I did when we met. Just like what I
had stopped doing during our times together and had simply accepted. That which
I had begun to learn.
The top of his head was swathed in gauze. The
make-up person at the funeral home must have had the easiest task ever. Luby’s
beatific face was what was very probably shone upon his proud new parents on
the day he was born. The purity, innocence, emanation of care for others, then
still alive in Luby’s countenance, could not have been augmented by a human
hand. I glowed then, as he would have unknowingly prompted me in his living
innocence. At peace was he, and so was I. He filled the room.
Thank you, Luby Small, for showing me and those
around you a fragment of true peace, for which I still look to you so
curiously, to vaguely understand. Thank you for your artless example of
goodness, rarely duplicated, that you carried with impossibly unselfish ease.
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