Playing Fair and Being Kind

I met Eddie in the first grade. He did something for me that was so sweet and comforting. He reached out to me and during our few years together in grade school we traveled easily together. Of course all of our journeys were behind the tenement buildings and triple-deckers of our neighborhood. How we met was my horrible first day of first grade. I was comfortable in kindergarten so I’m not sure why first grade was so scary for me. I remember being dragged along the corridor of the Edward Southworth school on Meeting House Hill. My mother had me by the wrists and I was screaming to no avail. I had my feet firmly planted and she was pulling me like I was on skis along the hardwood floor. Miss McCoy came out to the corridor from the classroom to help. I was making an entrance! All the other children were pretty well entertained by the noise and the drama. To be honest, the way things went for me later on in school and life in general I should have gone back to kindergarten. I was rushed into something for which I was poorly fitted. Another year in kindergarten could have prepared me to be a world famous brain surgeon. But instead I am just an old retired Navy man with poor social skills.

I was put in a seat behind Eddie. I’m sure he was traumatized by the whole thing as were the other kids. I was not happy to be there. Sometime during that first day Miss McCoy asked me a question and I tried to answer but no noise came out of my mouth. I’d lost my voice! Not a good day for me and I was becoming more miserable. I tried to say whatever it was but still I couldn’t make my voice work. I began to weep and I buried my face in my arms on the top of the desk. Total defeat. Eddie turned in his seat and he reached back and lifted my head with his hand. His look of genuine concern and quiet voice was like a soft breeze.

“Are you o.k.?”, Eddie asked.

I nodded the affirmative.

Thus began a trusting friendship.

I liked hanging with Eddie during the first three years of our school days. I think he left for another school by the fourth grade but in those three years I saw the way he lived and how poor his family was. I never saw Eddie’s father, just his mother. I would go to his apartment in a tenement building down the street from my house. His mother cooked and heated the house using a wood stove. It was Eddie’s job daily to go out and scrounge up a couple of arms full of wood in the neighborhood. The only wood available was trash wood. Dorchester had few trees and none were available for burning. Eddie’s routine was to wander the back lots between buildings and find what he could that would burn hot enough to be useful. There was an old empty wooden garage behind the houses across the street from my house so we pulled some clapboards loose and broke them into stove length before returning to the tenement. This was a daily chore for Eddie and I recall him being quiet during the process. I think he was self conscious and saddened to be having to do this with me around. Still I think he was o.k. with my presence. I never made any wisecracks or anything. It was just another thing we could do together as far as I was concerned.

As I said. I lost track of Eddie after the third grade. I don’t know what happened to him or where he went. I have looked in the phone books and in recent years I have searched for him online. I hold him in my heart and that is all I can do. I want to know that he is o.k. I guess. I want to lift his head and ask him if he is o.k.

G. M. Goodwin 10 July 2016