A Safe Place for Joey (30 page)

“How’s he coming, Charlie?” I asked a week before the science fair.

“Good. Real good.” Charlie’s eyes shone, his cowlick zinged up from his head. “It’s almost done. He’s almost three feet high and Mom and Dad both helped me last night and we even got his head fixed on so
that it will sort of wobble back and forth. And now we’re going into the museum and I’m going to take pictures of lots of different kinds of dinosaurs, and then I’m going to make this tape about them that plays over and over for people to listen to if they want to. I really wanted to do a videotape, but Mrs. Yager said that was too complicated. I guess she’s right. We got a big enough problem just
getting ole Rex set up.”

I arrived at the science fair at about ten thirty. Nothing had changed since I’d been to the science fair two years ago. Rosebushes still surrounded the parking lot, matching the pinky red of the low brick buildings. Boys in navy blue blazers, girls in coloured cotton dresses, mothers looking much the same as the girls, fathers in business suits, and teachers in
skirts, blouses, and low-heeled shoes filled the slate walkways and the gym itself.

The desks had been covered with the rose-red cloth and set in the usual U, with approximately sixty fourth-graders sitting or standing behind their exhibits as teachers led the other classes past and parents talked in little knots around the room after going through the line.

I leaned against one wall,
soaking it all in, liking the school. Despite or maybe even because of the formality and rules and dress code, creativity flourished amid respect for learning.

I couldn’t actually see Charlie, but it was easy to tell where he was. At the far end of the exhibits, Rex waggled his huge green plastic head above a constant crowd of gawking children and parents. Obviously, Charlie’s exhibit was
the hit of the show.

I knew I should just get in line, go shake Charlie’s hand, and then get back to work, but I put it off, taking pleasure in looking at all those people admiring Charlie and something he’d done.

A hand touched my arm, and I turned to see June Hammond beaming at me. “Aren’t you nice to come,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? Have you talked to Charlie yet?”

“No,
but I will. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

Jim Hammond had been talking to a group of parents; now he turned toward me and I stretched out my hand. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Hammond said, smiling. “You know, Charlie did most of it himself. He drew a plan first, and then made a small-scale model. I mainly helped getting the big one assembled.” His strong hand closed
around mine, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

June Hammond turned as more parents stopped to say how proud she must be. Jim Hammond released my hand, but his black eyes were still intent on mine. “I’ve wanted to tell you … thank you, I mean,” he continued, “and to apologize. You were right about Charlie. I don’t know how I could have missed it all these years. He’s incredible
when it comes to building things. You know, I’m beginning to think he could actually be an architect or an engineer someday.”

I nodded agreement.

Jim Hammond reached out and pulled June toward us. “And it’s not just Charlie. June made another big sale, and now they’re hinting at a partnership. She’s the best salesperson they have.”

“And you?” I asked. “How are you doing?”

“Fine. Just fine,” he said. “I’m still not adept at understanding people, but June’s good enough at that for both of us and I get a lot of satisfaction from my work.” He smiled at me. “Like you. But the main thing is, you were right about my getting to know Charlie – and June. I’m glad I didn’t miss either of them.”

“Me too,” I said, and went off in search of Charlie.

As I worked
my way around the exhibits, I thought about how one thing leads unexpectedly to another. June Hammond was blooming like the proverbial rose now that Jim had joined the support team for Charlie.

Finally I got to Charlie and reached across the faded-red-covered desk to shake his hand. “That’s one terrific dinosaur,” I said.

Charlie thanked me, but it was obvious he really didn’t have
time to talk.

“Good-bye, Charlie. See you later,” and I grinned at him as I left. “There sure seem to be a lot of somebodies who want to know you now.”

I had thought when we first bought our house that I needed a separate entrance and waiting room for my office. But any structural change would require a re-evaluation of the entire house with an accompanying increase in taxes, and Cal advised waiting. Maybe he suspected something more as well. In any case, it turned out to be good advice. I wouldn’t even consider a separate
waiting room now.

Our side door opens directly into the kitchen, and from there it’s only a few steps to the stairs that lead to my office. The kitchen is ours during the morning and evening hours, but in the afternoon it belongs to the kids. From after school on, there’s an ever-changing flow of children through the kitchen. They open the door for each other; they drape their coats across
the chairs; they pile their book bags, their boots, and sometimes their shoes on the floor or cellar landing; they make the popcorn if I haven’t had time; they debate the virtues of various television shows or turn the television off entirely if somebody has a paper that’s due or a test coming up. Some children walk straight from school and wait in the kitchen for an hour or more before their appointment.
The big ones help the little ones with their homework, and they share their prizes while they wait for their parents or taxis to come and pick them up. I have never heard an argument or seen a mean act in the kitchen. The kids have made it a very safe place for themselves.

Nan, my youngest daughter, works with me now. She’s a learning specialist herself and a superior grower of children.
She has the little upstairs room right next to mine. So now the kitchen is twice as full, and deliverymen and unexpected visitors do double takes when they view our crop of children.

They let each other in, but Nan or I let each child out, and the children that are waiting call to us as we pass through the kitchen.

“My turn now?” David asks.

“Almost,” I say.

“What day is
it, anyway?” Bob inquires. “I gotta put it on my homework here.”

“Friday,” David answers. “Are we going to write today like usual, Mary?”

Upstairs, David settles himself behind the big old desk, and I sit beside him in a smaller chair.

“Anything good or bad happen since I last saw you, David?” I begin our ritual.

“Two goods. One bad.”

“Which first?” I ask.

“The bad. John whacked me on the head in school today.”

I wrote it down in David’s book.

“But I didn’t whack him back. That’s one good, and the other is that it’s the weekend and tomorrow I got karate.”

“Pay yourself one hundred and seventy-five for your goods and bad, and add an extra bonus of fifty. It took control not to hit back, and that’s not easy.”

David bent his
handsome seven-year-old head over the chip box and deftly extracted the chips. He was in second grade and had been coming to us twice a week for a year and a half, so he knew the ropes. He had arrived as an angry, acting-out, nonreading first grader. He lied; he hit; he cried as well.

But now I was about to cut his two sessions a week to one. He was a natural athlete, his math had always
been good, and now he was on grade level in reading and getting good grades on the weekly spelling tests, if he studied hard. But he still had a lot of trouble with spontaneous writing, so every Friday we worked on this.

David passed me a pad of paper and my favourite pen and did the same for himself.

“I already know what I’m writing about,” he said.

“Well, you’re ahead of me,
then.”

“Yup.”

David already had the first word down, but I wasn’t in any hurry to start. I liked looking at him – I liked the vibes in the room. David exuded confidence and grace, and I thought about child expert Urie Bronfenbrenner’s statement that every child should spend part of each day with someone who loves him and whom he loves in return. David was lucky. He had both a father
and a mother who loved him a lot. Theirs was a busy, hectic family that included two other boys besides David, one older, one younger. Both parents worked and loved their jobs, but they also loved their kids and took time to show them that they did.

I could hear Bob reading softly to Nan in the next room. A light glowed under their door, and I thought how lucky we were to be able to work
in such a good place. Happiness was almost visible.

“Aren’t you even starting yet?” David asked, emphasizing the last word.

“I’ve almost got it,” I said, referring more to what I was thinking than to what I was about to write. David had the loving and also help from us while he was still young, and we all tried to give him a safe place where he could practice and not get down on himself
if he made a mistake. Love, specialized help, and a safe place. That seemed to do it.

David put his pencil down. “I’m waiting for you now,” he said.

“Okay. I’m ready. What are you writing about?”

“Karate. That’s what I’m working on. I’m going to take my brown-belt test tomorrow. And that’s what I’m writing about.”

Karate – that’s what David was working on. Children and
my book – that’s what I was working on.

I picked up my pen and wrote. “I’m having a lot of trouble finishing this book I’m trying to write.”

David was busy writing again, too. He paused for a minute. “We’ll trade and read them when we’re done, okay? What’s yours about?”

I read my first sentence to him out loud.

David nodded. “That sounds pretty good. ’Member to print so
I can read it.

“Okay,” David announced a few minutes later. “Let’s switch. I’m done and yours is long enough. You go first. Read mine out loud, okay?”

“I like karate,” I read. “You have to know weaponry, martial arts, fighting, and karate. I hope I get my brown belt tomorrow. Mary, I will show you how to do karate when we’re done writing. This is a picture of me fighting.”

David
had to help me decipher some of the words, but his paragraph was over forty words long. It hung together and made sense, and the illustration was clear and full of action.

“Good,” I said. “Pay four hundred and twenty.”

David counted out the chips quickly and then bounced out from behind the desk to demonstrate karate blows, leaps, and vicious kicks.

“There,” he said with satisfaction.
“Now I’ll read yours.” He read my two paragraphs out loud and then turned to me. “Is your book about us? I mean about kids like me?”

I nodded.

“Well, I know what you ought to call it, then.”

I studied David carefully. “You do?”

His turn to nod. “See, you just draw a big bubble like this.” David demonstrated on the pad of paper. “And inside the bubble you write HELP! – like
in capital letters with a ’splanation thing. Now you draw a line down to this kid at the bottom of the page so you can tell he’s saying it. This will be like on the cover.”

I watched in fascination as David returned to the bubble and drew curving lines around it.

“See,” he said. “You gotta be sure to make the bubble all wiggly. That way everybody will know the kid is thinking it, not
saying it out loud. I mean like he’s screaming. That’s why you gotta write it big, but he isn’t making any noise.”

“Is that what he’s saying … screaming, I mean? Help?”

David nodded.

“Why doesn’t he just say it out loud?”

“He doesn’t know … I mean he knows something’s wrong, and he wants somebody to help him, but he’s scared that maybe whatever’s wrong can’t be fixed. So
he figures he better not say it out loud – in case.”

I nodded, not able to find equally good words for an answer. But I knew then that I would – had to – finish this book. Somebody had to say David’s words out loud.

I lingered in my office after Nan and the last of the children had gone, reliving the day, relishing the time with David, trying to recapture the thoughts I’d had while
I sat beside him. He was doing so well. Why? I needed to understand in order to help other children.

Love, help from someone specifically trained to remediate learning disabilities, ending every session with success, and a safe place. “A safe place,” I repeated softly. I liked the sound of the words. I remembered thinking that this was why the children rushed to our kitchen, lingered there,
even bringing brothers, sisters, or friends to wait for them till their lessons were done. The children had made themselves a safe place in our kitchen, and they knew it.

I pulled a pad of paper toward me, feeling the urge to try to write it down. Could I take the unwritten rules of the kitchen, understand them, expand and translate them into the principles, the ingredients, of the kind
of safe place that these children needed in their homes and schools?

I worked every night for a week, staying in the office after the children left, going back up after dinner, filling page after page with stories of the children – their successes and failures, trying to crystallize their needs – then cutting, paring down the words, until less than a page was left.

A Safe Place

1. In a safe place people are kind. Sarcasm, fighting, backbiting, and namecalling are exceptions rather than the rule. Kindness and consideration and forgiveness are the usual way of life.
   
2. In a safe place there is laughter. Not just the canned laughter of radio and television, but real laughter that comes from sharing meaningful work and play.
   
3. In a safe place there are rules.
   The rules are few and fair and are made by the people who live and work there, including the children.
   
4. In a safe place people listen to each other. They care about each other and show that they do, with words and also with body language.
   
5. In a safe place the adults are the models for the others.
   

I printed the words on a new piece of paper and then read them out loud. Each
sentence set off a remembered montage of children, and I walked over to the shelf that held the children’s bins and read the rules of a safe place out loud once more to the absent children. Did I have it right? Were these the ingredients of a safe place?

I put the paper on my desk, walked to the back window, and looked out over the dark woods and up to the stars above them.

Which of
us doesn’t need a safe place somewhere in our lives? Which of us hasn’t gone searching for it if we haven’t found it in our homes or schools?

I believe that we must explore and dare and discover.

But we also need to know that there is a safe place where we can find the comfort, courage, and confidence to conquer our feelings of inadequacy, pain, sadness, and failure so that we can
go out and risk again.

Children with learning disabilities experience humiliation and hurt earlier and more often than most. Their need for a safe place is great.

I left the stars, and picked up the piece of paper and tacked it to the wall behind my desk. I would keep it there as a kind of creed to live by. A creed given to me by the children.