I bought a red pen yesterday, a cheap plastic invention that has a snowman that lights up in the top with a red LED every time you push the pen down. It is a stocking stuffer, a laugh, a tiny item. It is also something that triggered a memory for me. With a smile and a few fingers wrapped around the pen, I remembered a series of letters I had in red felt tip pen. A tiny patch of notebook paper in a field of innocence, I had letters from a nice boy once, a boy I don't often think about.

I lost my grandfather and I lost Kim, and both of those losses tore me apart in places I didn't know I had seams. Bouncing back from their deaths was something that I have only just been able to say I have done. I have jumped that bar, and let my pole go crashing back to the ground as I land on the soft supple pad, laughing and crying from the strength it takes to let someone go.

In 1988 I was living in a small town in Arkansas. My mother and father had split for the final time and we were living with our mother as she worked her way to a new brand of self and a new sense of freedom. The summers were hot, so hot that I actually once tried to sizzle an egg on the sidewalk, only I gave up when the only thing that happened was a load of ants drowned in the white gummy bits.

I had a hard time fitting in there. Not only had I not grown up there, in a little town where everyone had known everyone all their lives, but I didn't have the same set of values of how to fit in-I was a loner, I kept to myself, and since I moved house so often I didn't find it worthwhile to try to make friends, no matter how badly I needed them.

It was a recipe for disaster.

I made one friend, a neighbor who also only just fit in. She convinced me to join her church, a Southern Baptist church that I went to partly for the company and partly because it amused me. There at the church I met a student only slightly older than me. He had a broad, happy face and a horrible haircut. He was wearing short shorts the likes of which had not been seen this side of the Charlie's Angels. He also had a heart of gold.

His name was Rodney.

The first words I ever said to him were: You have a very funny haircut.

The first words he ever said to me, dripping in a strong southern Arkansan accent, were: Do you like it? I cut it myself.

We became friends right away.

Rodney was adopted and lived his life for his church. He was a deeply faithful man who never preached, and this I think was why we got on. He didn't see me as a loft conversion project, he didn't see me as something broken that needed to be fixed. He was easygoing and kind, and I think he saw in me the project of a lifetime, that project being friendship. He took me under his wing and made sure I was looked after. He made me laugh.

I know he fancied me, too, but I never felt that way about him. He once passed me a note in class asking if I would go with him (this being the ambiguous term that contained everything from love to heartbreak, from the person who would sit next to you at lunch to the guy whose ring you wore.) Biting my lip, I met him after class and told him that I really liked him, but I couldn't feel that way for him.

He smiled. I remember his smile. He had sweet white teeth. He said it was ok, that we could be friends. At least if we could be friends, he would have me around. And that kind of comment wasn't something I was familiar with. That kind of comment was something new to me, some way of intimating that I had some proportion of value to him, even if it wasn't what he'd been looking for.

We all were shuttered off to a church camp, an event that was not easy going for me. I didn't like being searched on arrival-they searched everyone to check for alcohol or drugs, and without fail they always missed a substantial stash-and I didn't like evening events that whipped you into a frenzy. I didn't like having to attend these lectures, and I didn't like being force-fed religion (in fact, I still don't, so please don't leave religious comments, m'kay?). But I did like staying in the local university dorms, the first sweet batch of freedom I ever had. And I did like spending time talking to and being with Rodney.

When the camp ended it was back to the town we lived in, the town with little money and footpaths that ended dreams if you walked the wrong direction. It was a close community but my family and I never really fit in, as nomadic as we were, as strange as we were. When we found out we were moving to Texas, I felt relieved-I had no problem with Arkansas, only being there started off the times when I began to understand that something was wrong with me.

When I moved, Rodney started writing me. Often. His letters always came in bold script, written by a red felt tip pen. His handwriting was loopy and childish. His letters were always so kind, so inquisitive. He had this optimism that was breathtaking to watch, and I would often tease him and be sarcastic about his ability to find the good in everything and everyone. Once again in my life, I was the shadow. He was the light, and I was the dark. He was the optimist while I was the cynic. He was a healer of hearts, while I was the one stricken with a sickening black cancer of self-hatred.

He would tell me what he was up to-he spent a lot of time and a lot of his own money buying Bibles, which he would go to the local prison and distribute, spending time talking to the inmates and being a friend to some men who had absolutely no one else to go to. He would tell me all of the town news I was missing, and in return I would write to him about things in Texas. He would regale me with tales of what he had been doing to fix up his car, and I would tell him about attending a school of over 1000 people in my class, none of whom I could really ever talk to. He would tell me to never cut my long hair, and that it would be great to see him. I would tell him I was sick of my hair, and that I missed him too.

About a year after I moved, his letters stopped coming. I didn't really think too much about it, I knew he was a busy guy-a guy like Rodney had a lot of friends and family that he spent time with and loved very much. He had a serious girlfriend, too, and for that I was really happy for him. I always pictured him married, a small-town guy with a big-town heart, a youth minister and a hard worker, raising an infant up in the air in a game, his gold wedding band sparkling against the clean white baby outfit.

About a week later, I got a letter from the one other friend I had made in town. Rodney was missing. They had tried to call me, thinking he might have come to visit me, but since we had moved again we had a new phone number. Had I seen Rodney? Had I heard from him?

I immediately wrote a letter back, saying no. I hadn't heard from him. I was sure he was ok, and after posting that letter I didn't think too much about it again-it was Rodney, after all. He would be ok.

But my letter passed another letter in the mail. As airplanes took off, their bellies full of letters demanding money, offering congratulations and happy birthdays, sending fliers offering the greatest deals in the world, two letters missed each other completely and sped off to their destinations, completely unaware of each other. As my friend got my letter saying I hadn't seen him, I was opening a letter from her, telling me what had happened.

Rodney had been found.

Rodney was dead.

I remember where I was at that moment I read those lines. I was walking across the condo complex where we lived at the time, and had just opened the gate around the swimming pool, taking a shortcut back to the house. I remember my legs giving out underneath me and I fell to the ground feeling the bumpy concrete surface of the pool area under my thighs. I remember losing my breath in one foul punch to the ribcage, and my eyes swam with tears that just caught and caught and caught under my eyelids, stubbornly refusing to fall.

Rodney was driving home one night in the car he was always rebuilding. While driving, he saw two hitchhikers, whom he took pity on and helped. One of them started to get sick and so Rodney pulled the car over and helped the guy to the side of the road. As he was bent over, helping the man, the other man pulled a gun out and shot Rodney in the back of the head, killing him instantly. They then stole his car and drove away, leaving his bleeding body by the side of the road.

And I felt like someone had punched a hole into the world and taken the light away. The very definition of a good man had been taken from the world. A hero, a friend, a nightlight that gave comfort and security as it lit up the darkness. He left behind a grieving family, a destroyed girlfriend. And he left behind me, a person that never got the chance to tell him just how much I cared about him and just how much his friendship meant to me.

It was the first time, but far from the last, that I would rage at the heavens and ask why they took someone as great as him and left behind someone as hopeless as me. It was the first time I would choke on the bile of injustice. It was the first time I would see the true loss the world faced in his taking, and the bitter burden they would be shifted with that was me.

I spent a lot of nights crying after that. I took his letters and the pictures I had of him and bundled them tightly with a red ribbon, and I would hold them and cry. The tears would fall on the letters and blur that stupid red felt tip ink through the pages, but I didn't stop. Nothing could make me stop.

His mother started writing me after that, sending me clippings of the trial. She sent me his senior high school photo, a picture of a happy-looking Rodney with his too short wonky hair, smiling slightly into the camera. The two men who killed him were caught-both felons for other crimes in the past, they were facing a lifetime in prison or the death penalty. Watching this all unfold was so horrible-I hated those men with a blind burning passion, a passion brought forth by the utter injustice of the nicest man in the world being taken away. Upon hearing of their guilty verdicts some time later, I wanted them to fry, I wanted them to burn. I wanted them to die a horrible death for taking a gun and lighting up the inside of Rodney's head with a blinding flash.

Rodney's family went another route, however. The two men 'found God' while awaiting trial, and Rodney's family apparently recommended they be given life in prison. The men are, as far as I know, still in prison, and I hope that's where they will stay, seeing as their lives were spared.

I think that's the way Rodney would have wanted it.

About a year after his death, I took his picture, his letters, and all the clippings and sent them to his mother. She wrote back saying I had brought her great joy and happiness seeing and touching his words again, but did I want them back? And why were some of the pages so water-stained, so blurred?

I wrote back one last time and told her to keep them, to hold him in her heart. I told her the pages were subject to a broken pipe we had in the house, which unfortunately got some of the letters. Another lie in a lifetime of lies, another way of keeping everyone at bay and of forcing me to keep to myself: they are blurred because I cried on them. Those words are covered with my tears, and there's no one I want to know about that.

To be honest, I don't often think of Rodney, maybe because there have been two other deaths in my life that take precedence in the grieving category now. The wound of his death has, for me, healed. I no longer rage at the heavens, I no longer want to fight the injustice of death. I like to think that there are many parts in him that live on in me, but that's a little too Hallmark Channel for my tastes.

I don't think that the good guys always get it stuck to them, which is perhaps the most convenient conclusion that a person can come to. Instead, maybe each time a good guy is ripped off the page, it leaves a hole that we have to step up and fill. In the balance of good and evil, despite the cynic in me, I like to think that good is still winning. Because the simple truth is, Rodney taught me to have a little compassion for those who have no one, to hand out the change in my pocket if someone asks, if someone's hungry. If I can help, I will try.

In my memory, I see Rodney as that nice picture of him his mother had sent me. I see him holding an inmates hand and praying with them. I see him laughing at me pointing out his funny haircut at that horrible church camp so many years ago.

I see him as a young man, maybe because that's all he ever will be.

Merry Christmas, Rodney, wherever you are. I hope you have a decent haircut now.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:30 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 2504 words, total size 13 kb.