Can I Sit With You?

Ken Putnam
Fourth Grade

In 1959, I was in grade four at Brentwood Park Elementary School in Burnaby, British Columbia. I was not a bright student; far from it. One day, while I was trying my best to avoid a question from the teacher, the PA system came on. It was the school secretary, summoning me to the nurse's office. The school nurse was a nice lady, and since I did not feel sick and other kids got called to see the nurse all the time, I was not at all concerned.

When I knocked on the nurse's door, a male voice said, "Come in." I went in, and was met by a really old man -- probably around forty years old -- who introduced himself as Doctor Someone. The good doctor wore a light scruffy beard, thick glasses with large black rims, a plaid sports jacket, and of course a tie. On the desk was a pipe, because this was back when most adults smoked just about everywhere.

The doctor asked me some questions: "Ken, do you have brothers and sisters?" "Where do you live?" What's your favorite colour?" "Do you have a pet?" I answered all the questions to the best of my grade four ability and was feeling pretty good about the whole deal. At least here I could get some answers right, not like in the classroom.

Then he hit me with the big one: "Ken, I'm going to give you some coloured pencils and I would like you to draw me a picture of a man." I began to panic. Fear froze me. I couldn't draw a straight line, let alone a picture of a man. He told me he was going to leave the room and come back in about 10 minutes. He left. I wanted to jump out the window. I had no idea why this guy wanted me to draw a picture of a man. What had I done? Why was this happening to me?

I did know one thing: the results of my artistic endeavors were going to be very very important to my future. A pass or fail on my drawing would no doubt be the catalyst for something great or terrible. I picked up the green pencil, then the red, followed by blue and yellow. My brush-cut head was wet from sweat, and my fingers sore from squeezing the pencil so hard. My little brain was roaring at 1000 MPH.

The door opened and back in came the doctor: "Well, how did we make out, Ken?"

"Okay, I guess," I said, and I handed him my picture. A slow smile came across his face and then a soft chuckle. He put down the picture, looked me eye and said, "You know Ken, I don't think there is anything wrong with you at all, you're going to be just fine."

The doctor was right. I'm 58 years old now. In 2005 I retired after 34 years with the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and now work for Yukon Department of Justice. And the picture? Well, I drew the Doctor: complete with his pipe, plaid jacket, glasses, and beard.

by Amanda Jones
Age twelve at the time

When I was twelve years old, the father of a girl in my class committed suicide in deplorably bad taste. One fine Sunday afternoon he suggested the family go to the movies. Excited, all four children and their mother drove downtown with him. There, outside the parking building, the father told the family to get out of the car, leaning over and kissing each of them as they did so. Not being a demonstrative man by nature, the family thought this act mildly unusual, but no one commented. They stood on the sidewalk and waited for him to park and join then on the street.

Instead, he took the car to the sixth-floor rooftop, got out, locked the door, and jumped off, landing in full view of his family.

The man was clearly disturbed, but the malevolence of his method stunned the community. In the full bloom of pre-adolescent egocentricity, none of us knew what to say to Lucy Q, whose father had introduced domestic horror into our lives for the very first time. She was an odd girl to begin with, bony and skittish. She didn’t perform well in class and she played no sports. I can’t remember if she had any real friends, and though I had known her since kindergarten, she was not one of mine.

Naturally there was a tide of morbid pity that swept through the school, but in reality that pity translated into most of us avoiding Lucy Q, as she came to be known, mainly to distinguish her as, oh, that Lucy.

The truth was, I was haunted by the suicide. My mind kept attempting to recreate the scene. What were Lucy Q’s thoughts as her father hurtled towards her? Possibly, I postulated, she didn’t see him until he landed, with that sickening thump, in front of her. What happens to a body that falls six floors? Was there an obscene amount of blood? Was the family spattered? But the question that none of us could answer was why anyone would do something so infinitely terrible.

I never spoke to Lucy Q about the “episode,” as my parents referred to it. I could not bring myself to mention it in her presence, and when she talked about her father, she referred to him as “dad,” and spoke of him as if he were still alive.

I never knew what possessed my mother to invite her on our vacation mere months after the suicide. Of course it was something as basic as kindness, but surely, as I said at the time, she could have dropped off a smoked fish pie or offered to take Lucy Q to the pictures. But to invite her to share my grass hut for ten days on a tropical island without consulting me, well, it was ludicrous.

I had the impression Lucy Q was as appalled as I was, but her mother came to school to take her off for a passport photo, giving me a grateful smile as she left the room. I had no choice in the matter, and subsided into ill-mannered acceptance.

The first few days of the trip were consumed with travel and adjusting to being in the tropics. My mother fussed over Lucy Q, giving me fraught looks when I failed to live up to her ideal of a hostess. Lucy Q and I did not talk very much. She kept occupied by reading Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series and watching the geckos that moved industriously over the woven sides of our hut. I wrote moodily in my diary and walked the island, which was a tiny South Pacific dot, a place of no consequence on the global map.

It was my first time in a developing country. There was poverty on the island, but a moderate, subsistence kind of poverty that seemed not to make the locals miserable. They were hefty and tattooed and their teeth were dazzlingly white. They dressed in cloth bound around their torsos, even the men. I remember this fact surprised me, that they could work their crops wearing a skirt. They smiled unreservedly and beckoned to me if I walked past their fields, handing me a stalk of sugar cane that they had deftly peeled with a machete. There was a constant low current of excitement for me on that trip. It was years before I put a name to that feeling, but I believe it was the exhilaration of discovery.

Some days later one of the staff at the hotel asked if Lucy Q and I wanted to take a boat ride to an outer island to go snorkeling. Neither of us had snorkeled before, but we both agreed to go.

Although I was a strong swimmer, I was anxious about snorkeling, never having been taught how to do it. I wondered about Lucy Q. She was not on the swimming team, and her pale body in that loose bikini looked thoroughly inadequate for the task. Perhaps there would be another “incident.” There would be a drowning and we must return home and tell the benighted mother that her daughter was dead too.

But something curious happened on that snorkeling trip, a delicate shift that had the impact of a proverbial epiphany. Lucy Q and I donned the mask and fins and spilled into the sea, kicking in the direction the native guide pointed. The waters were of bluer blues than existed in my world previously, and the light flickered through it, dancing without rhythm.

There was entirely another world beneath those bluest waters. A parallel universe. A place of such great beauty that my head reeled. I looked over and saw Lucy Q, her eyes magnified comically behind the mask. I could see she was smiling. The reef sprouted in strange colors and unlikely shapes that made me laugh and suck water into my snorkel, and the fish in their outlandishly loud costumes seemed unafraid of us, the clumsy observers. When we approached they spun around with choreographed precision.

Lucy Q and I would raise our heads above the water to shout at one another about what we were seeing, and on one such occasion we saw our guide gesturing for us to swim into a cave with him. Once in the cave, he told us to swim to the back where we could dive underwater through a tunnel into another cave. It was pitch dark in the tunnel, he said. He would go first and pull us through by our hair. I felt my heart quicken, but both Lucy Q and I were so intoxicated by what we had seen that day that there was no turning back.

There was a blank moment of panic when I swam into nothingness and felt a hand grab my hair. My skull smashed on rock and I felt an urgent desire to turn back, but was pulled upwards suddenly into a glorious cathedral of rock and spectral light. And then Lucy Q surfaced beside me and I heard her shout, and it was a shout of amazement and triumph.

Looking later at Lucy Q’s sunburned face and listening to her chatter on for the first time, I knew why my mother had brought her to this place. On this tiny island no one but us knew her misfortune. She had escaped her own context. She was here to understand that she was not inextricably tied to her tragedy, she had the rest of her own life at her disposal, and she had the option to fill it with adventure and elation.

Because of that trip, I learned early on the curative power of travel. And ever since I have lived with a reverent appreciation for it, knowing it permits us the incalculable freedom of perspective. And I like to think it was a turning point for Lucy Q too, who went on to do great things with her life.

by Wynn Putnam
Age seven at the time

When I was almost eight years old, my family emigrated from Holland to Ontario, Canada. We spoke only Dutch, so when we went to school in Ontario, the teacher put my twin sister, me, and my two older sisters all in grade one. Once we learned how to speak English they would reevaluate us to see if my twin and I should really be in Grade three, and my older sisters in Grades four and six.

This was a one-room school house so we felt awkward and big sitting in the grade one row while kids our own size sat on the other side of the room and at the back. When the older, bigger kids would point and snicker at us we did not know what they were saying so we smiled at them. We wanted to learn to speak English, and be able to join in with their fun and sit with them.

This was a country schoolhouse, so everyone brought their lunch. At noon we followed the other Grade Ones, got our lunch bags from the hall, and started to eat. But one day when we went to get our lunch bags, a couple of the bigger kids went in front of us and grabbed them. They looked in our bags, ate what they liked, then tossed the bags into the garbage.

My sister and I went back to the classroom and tried to communicate to the teacher that these kids had taken our lunch. We could not say what had happened, and she thought that we did not have a lunch that day. Apparently a kid at the back said that we had already eaten our lunch and some other kids laughed. We started to point at the kids who had taken our lunch and made gestures with our hands, when the teacher took an apple out of her own bag and started to cut it in half. We shook our heads and started to cry. All of a sudden a few of the younger children came over to our desk and gave us some of their lunch, a cookie, an orange -- I can’t remember exactly, but they wanted to share. We stopped crying, smiled, and told each other in Dutch that the foods we were now being given were delicious, even better than what had been in our lunch bag. We communicated our thanks to these kids by smiling and making gestures of what we were trying to say.

For the next while we put our lunch bags in our desks, because it took quite a bit more time before we could speak English well enough to tattle on the few kids who tormented us because we spoke a different language. Most kids in the class tried to help us belong, even when they could see how big we looked in the grade one row, and that we talked in a strange language.

Smiling faces are the same in every language, and it’s easy to communicate with other kids that way and join in their fun. Kids like to sit with you when your face shows a friendly smile -- even if you cannot speak their language, they understand.

But it’s still something that brings tears to my eyes and inspires me when I’m feeling low.

by Jessica of Kerflop and Flawed but Authentic
High School

The public schools I attended from 6th grade to 12th grade had amazing special education programs for children with various handicaps. Children with Cerebral Palsy, Down syndrome, Autism, and more participated in “mainstream” programs that placed them along side the rest of us in classes like gym, Biology, History, and more. As a result, I grew up with a fairly mature slice of the adolescent population. I never heard anyone with a disability get teased or made fun of. Popular girls and guys joked with the special ed kids in the halls, walked with them to and from class, and volunteered as aides in their homerooms.

I was very close friends with a darling girl named Vanessa who had Downs. She made us a “Best Friends Forever” wallet card that I still have in my keepsake box. I was proud to see Jeff, another boy with Downs working at a local big box store a few years after we graduated. He would ride the bus and ask me if my friend Amy was willing to marry him yet.

Three years after I graduated from Murray High School, my little sister was a Senior and a finalist for Homecoming Queen. Among the 10 Homecoming Queen finalists were two girls with disabilities. Shellie Eyre had Down syndrome, April Perschon suffered from physical and mentail disabilities due to a brain hemorrhage she had in her childhood. Since special education students usually stay for a few extra years, I too knew Shellie when I attended Murray High.

The finalists were escorted out to the gym floor by their fathers or dates. When Shellie and April walked out, the crowd rose to its feet, cheering and clapping.

Shellie’s parents tried to prepare her for the possibility of not winning, but it was unnecessary. Murray High School crowned an adorable little plump girl with Down syndrome their 1997 Homecoming Queen that night. And you know what? There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience.

Kids can be so cruel. The movies and media that show the popular kids regularly mocking and ostracizing the “losers” isn’t that far off the mark. But stories like this do my soul good. Kids can be mature, responsible, caring human beings. I’ll never forget Shellie’s little face, beaming beneath her sparkly crown. April’s too, as she was crowned an attendant.

Whenever I feel like all of the terrible things that happen in the world seem to be winning, I just open my old sheet of newspaper and read the whole story again. Hope in humanity makes everything feel better.