The Sheila Variations

Keith M.

I was 9 years old, and so was he. We had been in the same class since kindergarten. [Correction from Keith M.: We actually met in first grade. He hadn't gone to the same school in kindergarten.] Keith had nice feathered hair, and he wore a comb in his back pocket, like the Fonz. Basically, he was the coolest thing ever. At recess, all of the girls would play "Catch Keith", which pretty much describes the entire game. Keith would spend his recess running like a madman, pursued by a shrieking mob of 9 year old girls. Oh, it was exhiliarating. Small 9-year-old hearts RACING with the adrenaline of chasing a boy. We were little kids, but it was that year, specifically, when BOYS suddenly became interesting to the girls in the class, and not just gross and annoying. And GIRLS suddenly became intriguing to the boys, and not just invisible creatures playing jacks on the sidelines of their kickball games. Recesses were out. of. control. There were scheming groups of girls standing in the sandbox, planning our attacks on Keith. Then, at some preplanned moment, we would leap into action and race towards him like ravening banshees. The point of the game, or the booty that we were after, was not his actual booty - well, not really - but to steal his comb, in his back pocket. We LOVED that he had a little comb like the Fonz. We thought that was the bomb. Poor Keith must have gone through 20 combs that year.

Let me just add something to all of this: It wasn't just that he was cute, and walked around like the Fonz. He also was funny, kind ... It seemed like he was nice to everybody. He was just that kind of person.

There was always something a little magical about Keith M.

And in looking back, I think it was more the magic that made all the girls chase him like lunatics, and less the comb and the cool hair. We were responding to something in his essence.

I hope I don't embarrass him when he reads this. I'm just writing it how I remember it.

We were friends, too. We had been friends since we were 5, and it was suddenly in 4th grade and 5th grade - when everyone became manically self-conscious about having friends of the opposite sex. For the first 3 years of our friendship, we had been in the Judy Blume books Sheila the Great and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. But suddenly when we hit age 9, age 10 ... we moved more into the Are You There God, It's Me Margaret Judy Blume genre. Even back then, I really liked having boys as friends, and Keith and I were good friends. He seemed to accept that every recess he would be run down like a mad dog by the girls in his class, and somehow it didn't impact the friendships.

After 6th grade, we left our small grade school, and went to the larger junior high - a wrenching change for me. There were suddenly way more kids, from other towns, people I didn't know ... and the small cozy world of South Road School was shattered. I saw my old friends in passing in the hall, I even had classes with some of them ... but we were all now in full-blown awkward adolescence, and so things were different. Things were way different. I still had my best friend from grade school - Betsy - a wonderful person who is still my dear friend today. I made new friends - Beth, Kate, Mere ... and grade school pretty much became, in the matter of a few months, a distant-past memory. It would have been unTHINKable to go up to Keith M. and chat about how I used to chase him, how I kissed him behind the fort, how we used to be such good friends. I didn't even consider the possibility - because junior high was a whole different ballgame. Those old days were DONE, man. Done and gone.

It made me sad ... but it was on a very subliminal level. I don't think I was even conscious to myself how much I mourned my childhood time. I just knew this was a whole new world: of dances, and social interactions, and lockers, and moving from class to class, and real school work, and mean girls, and indifferent boys ... Some people seemed to hit junior high completely ready for adolescence and all its trappings. They seemed to embrace it. Their clothes were perfect, they were up on all the trends, they leapt right into having dates with people, and gossiping about others, and acting like mini-grown-ups. (Of course this was just my envious impression. Those people were probably having just as hard a time as I was.) I still had one foot in childhood, and that was just not cool anymore. Did anyone miss the days of recess, and swinging on the swings, and playing hopscotch, and chasing boys around? I seemed alone in that. Those days were over, and now it was time to be a teenager. I resisted.

But of course ... you know how it goes ... I adjusted.

I didn't even think to myself: "Where is my old friend Keith M? I wish we were still friends ..." No. I hunkered down into survival mode.

Still, though, in any of my interactions with him - the impression of niceness and cool-ness remained. The old Keith M. was still in there. Some people hit junior high and had entire personality transformations. Little girls I had had sleepovers with suddenly were SMOKING in the parking lot, and barking out mean comments about me as I walked by.

There was no pamphlet to prepare me for junior high. I was 11 years old when I entered, still a kid really. When I was in love with someone, I swooned and mooned about, but there was never any question of actually DOING something about it. If I had my druthers, I would still be chasing boys on the playground, trying to steal their combs. But no. Now, I had to dress up and go to dances, and deal with all THAT. I was the epitome of awkwardness - dragged kicking and screaming into adolescence.

Two years later, high school began. Again: a new school. Massive. We were now in school with kids who were 18 years old. They were ADULTS, as far as I was concerned.

High school was, by far, way better than junior high. I found my stride a little bit. I joined the drama club. I worked on the yearbook. I had a great core group of friends - who are still my friends today. There was definitely a pecking order in high school, and because there were so many kids - the abyss between the "have"s and "have not"s was huge. However, on the flip side - because there were so many kids, it was easier to just hole up with your own group, and have a good time, and not worry so much about "the popular kids", and "why am I not popular", blah blah, the way I worried in junior high. I hung out with drama geeks, and band geeks, and these were my dear friends. I didn't stare at the table of cheerleaders in the cafeteria and yearn to be a part of their group. I had it really good at my own table. My friends are awesome.

Grade school was now so far away it might as well have been written up on papyrus tablets, for all the relevance it had to my life.

I watched in horror and fascination as one of my best friends as a little girl went off the rails, became a bad bad girl, and finally dropped out. What?? She was a perfect example of someone who was one of my best friends until we hit junior high, and then she never spoke to me again. I got used to it, but still - it gave me some odd moments.

Now back to Keith M. Keith M. continued his trajectory from grade school. It was not surprising at all that he would eventually be one of the most popular (and coveted) guys in our class. He played football. He was gorgeous. He was a good student. The signs were all there in 4th grade ... so it made perfect sense that that would be his high school experience. No huge personality change for him. (And this, I believe, is part of why I say there was something "magical" about him. His personality was such that he couldn't change dramatically ... even with all of the changes adolescence brought. He was still the same kid I remembered from kindergarten on up.) However: our dealings with one another were brief. Unless we had the same class, we were no longer in the same circle of friends at all. He was at the untouchably popular table in the cafeteria - the football players and their cheerleader girlfriends. I was whooping it up with the band geeks in the corner. Never EVER the twain shall meet. At least not in high school.

This was not something I obsessed over, or even thought about. It just WAS.

Keith M. had girlfriends, he was featured at pep rallies in his football uniform, he was completely in a different world than mine.

It's interesting, though - when I go to unearth my old journals for Diary Friday - how often his name comes up. It's always something stupid - he and I laughing about how bad we did in a certain math class ... but there seems to have been a WAY that I wrote about him that really strikes me now in the present day. Like that entry. It was the familiarity - of knowing someone since we were 5. Although that was now unmentionable. We were now teenagers, trying to be grown up, trying to make our way in the world ... It wouldn't do to reminisce about something that was still so CLOSE as childhood.

And here is my main memory of Keith M. in high school. To me, it says it all - about who this person really IS. He had never changed - he would have behaved this way as a 9 year old too. I had been pretty burnt by the transition from grade school to high school ... I lost a lot of trust in people, I lost a lot of self-confidence - and Keith M.'s behavior this one day had a huge impact on me.

I don't want to retrospectively analyze this too much - and assign a bunch of meaning to this - but I do want to make clear that even at the time - Keith M., in this one memory I have of him, made a MASSIVE impression. It was one of those moments, in the wilderness of high school, in the Darwinian atmosphere of high school, when I suddenly thought: Huh. People aren't so bad after all. Kindness is still possible. Even when you're a 17 year old star football player. Life is not all THAT bad.

We were in our senior year, and I guess we were in the same gym class. We were playing baseball. Gym was always kind of a stressful thing for me, because I am a perfectionist, and I am also kind of insecure - and was even MORE so in high school. Team sports especially made me crazy, because if you messed up - you impacted your TEAM. I so so wanted to do well. But that's just an aside. That's not the real point of this story.

Keith M. and a bunch of his buddies were in my class - nice guys, all of them. But intimidating. At least I found them all intimidating. They all had long-time girlfriends, they 'went steady' - they had cars - they played football - they just seemed like they were in a totally different universe. They were untouchable. Because of their popularity, I often assumed that they would be "mean". Popular kids traveled in packs (especially girls) - and there's nothing scarier than a pack of teenagers. This one day in our gym class (we were at Old Mountain Field, for you guys reading this from my town) - another kid joined our class - just for the day. I'm not sure what the deal was - if he was making up a class, or what ... but this kid was a mentally challenged kid. I do not know the correct term nowadays. Then he would be called "mentally retarded" - but I know that has derogatory connotations. He was mentally disabled, in a big way, and there he was, in our gym class.

I'll just talk about my response to all of this, because it remains vivid to me.

This kid shows up to join our class, as we are all getting ready to play. And I remember suddenly feeling a mixture of emotions: I felt uncomfortable being in his presence, because I was a teenager, and I didn't know how to deal with someone who was mentally disabled. I also felt so protective of him ... There was a part of me that steeled myself for the teasing and snickering I thought would come his way. I knew how cruel teenagers could be. I knew about the pack mentality, and how the pack sniffs out weakness, difference. I was nervous. Nervous that he would be teased, and that I would not be able to do anything about it. But also: I tried to keep my distance from him, because I also had a horror of being teased. I have to say: It was not my finest hour. I felt scared for him, but I also didn't stand up beside him, and welcome him. I didn't have enough self-confidence for that. Again: I'm not proud of my cowardice in those awkward 5 minutes before the ballgame started.

Peripherally, I was aware of everyone else in the class, also kind of dealing with the fact of this kid. No one said anything. But you just could FEEL the awareness, and more than that: I felt a sort of stasis, a tense stasis, in all of us ... like something was going to happen. This gym class could go either way, and no one wanted to make the first move, no one wanted to be the one to choose. The choices were: Let's tease this kid mercilessly. Let's be nice to him. That was where we all were, as a group, for about 5 awkward minutes.

Another thing was: I was in a class with a bunch of jocks. People who took team sports seriously. Winning was crucial. So ... an unspoken issue was: who wants to have this retarded kid on our team? We won't win if we have to deal with HIM.

Keith M., as I have said before, was one of the most popular kids in my class. In the same way that happened in 4th grade, people looked up to him, people liked him a lot ... but more than that: he had a lot of power. I'm not sure where power like that comes from - and I have to say again; I think it might have to do with "magic" ... Some people TAKE power, because they are weak, and cowardly, and their only way to feel powerful is to make other people feel bad. And some people just ARE powerful, and people are drawn to them because of that power ... and it is up to the person to use their power wisely and for good. I am completely projecting here, because I am sure Keith M. did not see himself that way (which was part of why he was so cool, by the way) ... but from MY side of the fence, from the drama-nerd table in the cafeteria, he was very powerful. He was a leader. He was the captain of his group. That was just the way it was. He was a natural leader - that's what I'm trying to say.

And I will never EVER forget how Keith M. easily and unselfconsciously stepped into that void in the gym class - the void of everyone wondering who was gonna make the first move - If ONE person had teased the kid, then it would have been open season. Safety in numbers. We hovered, as a group, on that tightrope wire.

But Keith M. was picked captain (of course!!) and the other team captain was picked, and then they had to choose their teams. The first person Keith M. picked? Mentally disabled boy.

I have tears in my eyes.

And from that moment on: the tone of the day was set. Keith M. set it. Like I said: the kid was a leader in our school - but this was only because he was a NATURAL leader. Natural leaders behave the way Keith M. did in that moment.

And because Keith M. was the first one to "make the move", the first one to acknowledge the situation (all unspoken, of course) - the rest of us followed. What his actions said in that moment were: "We're gonna be nice to this kid today." All the big football jock boys, all the bitchy cheerleader girls, and all the awkward cowards like me ... felt safe and courageous now ... to take Keith M.'s lead.

I was on Keith M.'s team, and I remember, too, the first time mentally disabled boy was up to bat. He was awkward, gangly, he didn't know what he was doing. He knew he had to swing the bat at the ball.

The first pitch came. He swung the bat wildly, and missed.

Again: we, as a group, hovered on some precipice ... his swing was embarrassing, he looked ridiculous ... the scent of weakness in the air ... the scent of teenagers not knowing what to do, or how to handle being around this person ... and again: Keith M. took over, and shouted out, "GREAT SWING, man, GREAT SWING. Keep your eye on the ball, keep your eye on the ball ..."

My heart just swelled up in my chest. I know the word "hero" is thrown around a lot ... but to me then, and to me now, Keith M. was a hero in that moment. It's like Spike Lee's movie ... In that moment, Keith M. did "the right thing". And yes: there had been a clear choice. It could have gone either way. It could have been a torment, that gym class ... it could have been terrible. But Keith M., subtly, and with no fanfare, didn't let that happen. I am not sure how many high school boys, who KNOW they have a lot of power, can use it as sensitively and as kindly as Keith M. did in that moment.

I have never forgotten it.

The entire gym class became about supporting this kid. Keith M.'s posse of football player friends, some out in the outfield while we were up at bat ... took up the cheers. When the retarded boy got a hit, Keith M.'s friends in the outfield started cheering. The entire group shouted out at him, during his at-bats: "You're doing great! Great swing! Go, batter, swing, batter ..."

A bunch of 17 year olds, deeply mired in adolescence, deeply divided by the social structures of our high school, came together and decided to be kind.

Because of Keith M. Nobody else stepped up to the plate, so to speak. And he did so - naturally, and with no self-consciousness whatsoever.

Like I said: there was always something a little magical about Keith M. He had something. He had it as a 9 year old, he had it as a 17 year old, and I just saw him this past weekend - and of course, he has it now.

I sensed it even as a small child. My instincts weren't off. He was special. There was a reason mobs of 9 year old girls chased him during recess. And like I said before: the comb was only the surface trappings of what was really going on.

He was kind. In a moment when many teenagers would choose to be cruel - he chose to be kind.

Posted by sheila