May 9 Friday roundup

This week’s podcast episode of “Next Comes What” looks at ways political leaders and wellness gurus alike try to create a world in which your own irrepressible self must be tamed to their ends. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to explore links to different parts of the events mentioned in the episode, you can read this week’s Tuesday post.

Today, I’ll tell you about something that happened a year ago, an incident I think about almost every day.

First, a little background on Roland Flint, who taught me in his Poetry/Drama class my freshman year at Georgetown University: The passage in the image above is from “Stubborn,” a beautiful poem he wrote about grief and the death of his son, who had been hit by a car. It tells the story of how, long after his son died, he intercepted a toddler wandering unsupervised along the devil’s strip of a busy road.

He gave me a signed copy of it the year we met, once we had become pals. It made me realize there were whole universes of tragedies in life that I’d never imagined.

***

Studying with Flint was a revelation. My grandparents had owned a bookstore in the West Virginia town where I grew up, so I’d been fortunate enough to read as much as I wanted. And I’d known since I was in grade school that I wanted to become a writer. But I was shockingly unsophisticated—and in terms of emotional maturity, years behind my peers.

When I met Flint, I’d just turned seventeen. After escaping a traumatic household, I thought myself free, not yet understanding that the difficult work of reckoning with it all and finding a way to invent a self stretched years into my future.

From the first day of class, Flint treated me as a kindred spirit, as I suspect he treated every student. He’d grown up in North Dakota on a potato farm, with a family life bitter enough that joining the Marines (after he flunked out of college on his first attempt) felt easy by comparison.

He was a big man with red hair and a beautiful voice that seemed designed for reading poetry aloud, which he delighted in doing. He was equally happy to listen to students reciting verse to him.

He took us all to see “The Winter’s Tale” at the Shakespeare Theater, the first time I ever saw a Shakespearean production. We also wrote poetry in class.

That first year away from home, I grew profoundly depressed and began a descent into a grim place, which Flint realized long before I did. And maybe it was obvious—at one point, for an assignment to write a funny poem, I turned in the following.

The grade I got was generous enough, but he gently pointed out that only in West Virginia would “meant” rhyme with “Flint.” During my whole time on campus, he kept track of me, and we met often. Four years after our last class together, Flint sent my work to an editor he thought would like it, triggering my first publication in a poetry journal. A decade after I finished college, he came to my wedding. Two years after that, he died.

***

A quarter century after the last time I saw Flint, I was riding in a car with my husband—the same husband he’d met at the wedding. We were on our way to what now passes for spiritual practice: our Sunday morning workout at the gym. We usually take the highway, but that day, people were turning around on the shoulder and heading back down the entrance ramp the wrong way. Eventually, we saw a policeman had blocked access altogether, so we, too, turned around. It was only by chance we didn’t take our usual route.

We were making good time on a side street when we came to an intersection with no stop sign or light. As we sailed through, my husband noticed a toddler at the side of the road, starting to head into the crosswalk as we went by.

There was no grownup at his side. Just as we cleared the intersection, I said, “Pull over” and jumped out. I ran to intercept the boy—it looked like a boy—and shooed him back to the corner.

Other cars were stopping now, too, as if the universe had just become aware of the danger it had permitted. I squatted next to the child on the corner and said hello. His right arm was wrapped around a small beige stuffed animal. My mind was suddenly so terrified for him, I didn’t even register what it was.

He said “Momma,” then “find Momma.”

I asked if he lived in the house we stood next to, the one on the corner. He shook his head. I pointed to the next house, but he didn’t respond.

Another woman approached, pointing to a third house near where she stood, “Maybe he lives there?'“

I asked. He said no. 

“Well, maybe they'll know where he lives,” she said, and went to knock.

Meanwhile, the boy kept asking for Momma.

“Which way did Momma go?” I asked. He pointed down the street.

His steps were tiny. I realized it would take a long time to get to the end of the block, and how easy it would have been for a driver not to notice him in the street.

I squatted down again and asked if I could pick him up, as if we were going to go on an adventure. He said yes and reached for me with both arms.

I checked in with a third person who’d stopped to watch me and might have been wondering if she were witnessing a kidnapping. She joined our canvassing group, heading to a different house down the block to see if he lived there.

Though he’d pointed that he’d seen his mother go in that direction, I grew worried about taking him too far from where he’d gone into the street. I headed to the next closest set of stairs, and the boy and I went up. We knocked on the door together.

A big dog was barking inside, and someone lifted the blind. A woman came out. I asked if she knew the boy or where he lived. She said no and apologized for the dog barking.

I'd seen a teenage girl inside, and maybe that girl had recognized the boy, because after I’d gone back down the stairs and was almost to the street, the woman opened her door again and called to me.

“Wait! His name might be Jackson. He might live around the corner at the end of the first block."

I carried him back the way I'd come, past the corner where I found him, and down to the next street. I knocked on the door, and an older woman with dyed dark hair answered.

“Is this your boy? I asked, realizing as I said it that she was too old to be his mother. “I found him crossing the street at the end of the block.”

Then I noticed the woman was carrying a tiny baby.

“Yes,” she said, looking at the boy, “he's ours.”

The grandmother, I thought. As her mind caught up to events, she lifted her eyes to mine and mouthed a soundless O. A man's head popped up behind her.

“Is his name Jackson?” I asked. “He was asking for his mom.”

“Jackson, where's Momma?” the man asked. To me, he said, “I think they were out walking together.”

“I didn't see his mother anywhere.” 

“Jackson, do you know where Momma is?” the man asked, a little agitated.

“I think he’s scared,” I said, trying to calm the father, who began to put his shoes on.

“Let’s go find Momma!” I said to Jackson, still carrying him. 

The father grabbed his cellphone, fumbling it a little. Back down the stairs we went, now a party of three.

“I'll show you where I found him,” I said, heading down to the corner. Once there, we looked around.

“Want Momma,” Jackson said, whipping his head around, before yelling and pointing. “Butterfly!”

“Wow,” I said, “a butterfly,” wondering what was going on.

“How old is he?” I asked the dad, who was dialing a number on his phone. 

“Tell her, Jackson,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Two,” said Jackson, working his fingers into a peace sign for my visual inspection. I felt the bones of his ribcage, which seemed only a little bigger than my palm.

The boy's father was speaking to someone on the phone. He stopped walking. I stopped walking.

“Momma's at home,” the dad said as he hung up. “She was at home the whole time.”

“Oh, good,” I said to Jackson. “Your dad is going to take you to see your mom. Everybody's fine.”

I handed him off. “You take care of your dad, okay?”

I walked back to the car, where my husband waited. I got in, and told him what had happened. We marveled over the randomness of life as we headed to the gym, going on about our lives as if it were any other Sunday, as if I were not at all changed, as if there were any other story about a boy who was saved and a poem about another boy who was saved, written by a poet whose son died but who managed to rescue both the next child and me, meaning that it was Flint—through his poem and his poetry—who likewise saved Jackson.

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