It was my first year teaching. He doesn't come to mind when I think of my first day of school, though. He was too sick to show up until December or so. I can remember different members of the staff dropping into my room saying "Ralph's* here!" excitedly because they saw him on the bus. I was excited, too, I had been told over and over that I would love him.

Honestly, it is twenty-five years ago and at this new and difficult job, things were and still are sometimes a blur. I vaguely seem to recall that he never made it into the school the first day that he tried to. An ambulance had to be called before he ever got off the bus.

Ralph was on the older edge. Closer to 21 than 14. He was a quadriplegic. He could approximate recognizable words. He was African American, although that doesn't matter a bit except to help you develop a mental picture of him. He had a beautiful face which became absolutely luminous when he smiled. He smiled often and easily. But the strain of any physical movement could also be seen easily on his face, and the strain was so obvious from his jaw to temple, particularly. Looking back at my impressions from so long ago, today I would guess that he had both Cystic Fibrosis and Cerebral Palsy. He was also the thinnest young man I had ever seen. I also would always think that if we could unfold him (untie the pretzel of his limbs), he would probably be about 8 feet tall.

Whenever he did finally make it into the classroom, everything I had been told about how adorable his personality was proved to be true. There is an interesting fact about kids like Ralph that I wish I could explain. They appear to love you before they even meet you. Maybe it is because their lives are so limited by their physical presence and/or realities (like 99% of their days are spent in their apartment) that they love the experience of reaching you in a different place, but I do not think that that is the whole story. I think they love in an entirely intense way. I think they understand that their time is short. Their experiences are or will be limited, and they develop a keen sense of who people are. Do you look at them? I bet that is the first test. Do you talk to them? Test two. Do you make the effort to understand their responses, even if unintelligible, even if their response will only be in the slightest nuance of facial expression? Three. These tests take minutes for the student to administer, if you pass, though, you can forevermore do no wrong, essentially. You are golden. If you fail, it seems, you become invisible to them. Back to my precious time theory. They will not bother with you again. They will not be rude or hold a grudge, but their eyes will not follow you with regard ... the beacon of the light that is their face will not shine on you again. I was lucky. I had buckets-full of experience with deaf people. I spoke facial expression fluently. I was in.

Ralph's legs shook. Ralph sometimes cried. The way to alleviate this was to tip his wheelchair backwards. Sit behind him and tip his wheelchair backwards while holding it up. This took the lifetime of pressure off his spine and lower back. What I didn't know before meeting Ralph, what had never occurred to me, was that staying in the same position led to horribly painful degeneration. The only other way to alleviate pain was to take him out of his chair and put him on a mat on the floor in the classroom. Problem was he was very thin, but very long, and his limbs were spastic and flew in every direction. Two person job at least. Then when it was time go home, for example, it was almost impossible to get his body to go back into the position it hated. It was very difficult to cajole people to help me do this and it could not be done solo. And that is how I came to rely on Joe.*

Joe was Ralph's physical therapist. His face was also quite luminous. People like Joe do not wear their heart on their sleeve. It is plastered on their forehead. Joe was half Italian and Half Jewish. His name had all the syllables I was familiar with, but he dressed like a modified orthodox Jew. He had one blue eye and one green eye. I often thought this was a physical manifestation of the dichotomy of cultures living in him. AND he was a fantastic and tireless physical therapist. Any time I asked him to help me take Ralph out of his chair and/or work on him to relax his limbs to get him back in, he did. And he did it on our lunch hour. And he did it with a happy smile and engaging conversation. Ralph loved Joe as much as I did. The impression that Joe made on me regarding how to be was as indelible as the impression Ralph made on me. I do not think I would be the same teacher I am if not for his presence in my very early career. Our professional and personal paths have crossed in many, many ways in the quarter century I have known him, but I am particularly grateful that he was there when Ralph was there. And particularly grateful that they were both there, for me, right at the beginning.

As I said, these portraits are about students that I lost. You already know how this story ends. Thinking about Ralph, I cannot forget his wake nor what I learned about his mother after he was gone. Those remembrances speak to the same themes in some ways, in new and much broader themes in others.

Ralph's wake was in Harlem. I was twenty one and obviously not from the neighborhood. Just walking down the street trying to find the funeral home, I was getting some attention. I would realize through my very long career and too frequent occurrence of this kind of outing, that people figure it out pretty quickly. Young white female entering funeral parlor. You don't have to introduce yourself as the teacher.

As much as I learned from Joe about how to be a worker, I learned from the funeral parlor employees how not to be. First, they told me the wrong viewing time when I phoned, so I was there alone, and never did see his mother that day. Then they led me into the tiniest viewing room I had ever seen. There was room for the casket, a kneeler and, I think, three folding chairs. I am saying there was room for the casket, because the casket was not there yet. I watched them bring it in. I watched them almost drop him several times. I watched all the while thinking about how I had never seen anything like this and how that fact was all about expectation. When they finally finished setting up, I sat for a time. It was very quiet. I heard some rustling. As I sat there, looking at Ralph... Ralph relaxed and straight, by the way, as I had never seen him, suddenly a mouse ran along the long line of the casket closest to me. I actually thought, in a thought that I obviously have never forgotten 'thank god you are gone, because this would make you crazy.' In my classroom, very occasionally, when Ralph was on the floor on the mat he would suddenly become very agitated if he saw a bug of any kind or the occassional mouse anywhere. When you cannot move, as you can imagine, such a sighting is very serious. He would have freaked if awareness was part of this experience. I stood to kiss him goodbye. When I bent towards his forehead, I could see candy wrappers behind the parlor lamp and floral decorations flanking the casket. Mourners would not do that. Workers would, although I think we would need a different word for them. As I said, I learned along the lines of a familiar theme through my experiences with Ralph, and as much as Joe taught me how to be, my visit to the funeral parlor taught me how not to be.

After he was gone a week or two, and in the months and years to follow I would be in touch with Ralph's mother now and again. The communications while Ralph was with us were about how much he wanted to come to school , but couldn't or whether he had a respiratory infection or not, and the like. When he was gone she told me about how he came to be her son, because he wasn't. He was her best friend's son. She and her friend had an understanding. And when his mother was accidentally shot and killed on the street, the woman I was speaking to came to be his mother. In the years that followed she would always call me around christmastime to talk about how empty things were without him.

I said these stories would be dramatic and brave. And I said this portrait would touch on broader themes. It was the mid-eighties. Was that when we had a president who talked about a thousand points of light? These are the broader themes: social and economic injustice and the inequity of expectation. Another theme is light and the incandescent quality of a smile or of a friendship.


* The names in these portraits have been changed.


All photographs and text, unless otherwise noted, copyright (c) 2010 C.M. Carroll