How Did They Breathe?

When I was very young, living in Trenton, there was a family down the block that everyone knew. I think everybody had this type of family in their town. This was the type of family that had a Mother that would walk around the neighborhood, in her bathrobe, knocking on doors and asking for cigarettes. The Father, on the other hand, was a raging alcoholic who found it necessary to beat his children at the end of a long day.

There were three kids in the house. Two boys, one was two years older than I and one was one year younger, and a girl, who was probably three or four years younger. I would often play with both of the boys doing things that I would kill my kids for if they were caught doing the same things.

I’m going to call the kids A, B and C with A being the oldest and C being the youngest. I’m not using their real names because I recently met with B and was asked not to.

There was a time when we all went outside and saw an ambulance at their house. As we got down there we saw that A was lying in the street next to the family car. It seems that somehow A’s Mother had run him over. Fortunately the tire had only run over his leg but it was quite scary. The word was that A had somehow fallen out of the car and when he told his Mother to back up she had accidentally moved forward and drove over his leg. A was taken to the hospital and came home the next day with a cast on his leg.

While A was recuperating I would often be down at his house playing board games and listening to music. I remember playing Monopoly with A on the front porch and listening to the “Hey Jude” album. While we were playing, A and I were talking about the accident and he told me something that, to this day, still blows my mind. He said he had actually told his Mother to drive forward knowing that he would be run over. He was 10 years old. Think about that. He was 10 years old and wanted his Mother to run him over. How incredibly sad.

I was also friends with B even though he was a year younger than I we would often steal cigarettes from his Mother, Salem’s if my memory serves, and go out into the woods and smoke our little lungs out. I was eight and he was seven. B was a much quieter kind of guy than A. Middle child and all. The thing I most remember about him was his walks home from school. We would get out of school at 3:30 and it was maybe a 15 minute walk. The average kid would be home and out playing by 3:50 in the afternoon. As we’d all be playing in the street and it would start getting dark we’d notice B just getting home from school. This was a daily thing. He wouldn’t get home until around 5:30 or 6:00 every night. He always said he hadn’t gone anywhere, just strolled home.

At the time neither he nor any of us could figure out why it took him so long to get home. Looking back at it one can easily see that he simply wasn’t in any kind of hurry to get there. Why would he want to?

Karen, my sister, used to baby sit for them sometimes and recalls that they never had anything there for her to make for dinner. She would either bring them down to our house or come down herself to get some food to take back to their house and cook it there. Again, while this was going on, nobody thought anything about it. It was just the way it was. I don’t recall any kids on the block making fun of them or anything like that. They were just a family that lived on our block.

I remember going to the Detroit Zoo with the entire family and having a wonderful time. There were also numerous times that I’d be at the house and we’d listen to albums and play with our baseball cards. There was, however, one night that I spent the night and when the Father came home he proceeded to call each kid out into the living room. After getting them out there he started yelling at each and when that didn’t satisfy him, he started hitting them. I can still hear A yelling out for his Dad to stop. I was no more than nine years old. I remember opening the bedroom window, hopping out and running home. The next day it was if nothing had happened. Life just went on and this was their life.

I’ve thought about this family a number of times since I left Trenton and wondered what had happened to them. I happened to see A’s name on the classmates.com website and sent him a note just saying hi. He responded and we started an email relationship. I asked about his siblings and he gave me contact info for each. A is preparing to retire from the air force after 30 years. He’s widowed with a couple kids. I spoke to him on the phone the other day and we talked about our childhood. He remembers it pretty much as I do. We would remember times and events of things that would happen in his house and all I could think was, “how did you breathe?”

I got in touch with B just last week and found that he is a Pastor in the Detroit area. He remembered me and agreed to have lunch with me so I could ask him about our childhoods. B was 10 years old when I left the area and he, understandably, doesn’t remember a great many of the things I brought up to him regarding his childhood. He does remember the night I left through the window though. He also remembers us never talking about the incident after it happened. B remembers smoking in the woods but not where we got our supplies. He also remembers the day the “For Sale” sign went up on our house. He and I both thought there could be a shrink’s field day on these memories.

I told him my feelings on the whole god thing and we talked about how odd I thought it was that he would become a man of god after all he had been through. He said he could totally understand my questioning him about it. I said I compare his believing to the Jews of the Holocaust. I can’t understand how they could believe in God yet also can’t understand how they wouldn’t. He understood what I meant. We talked some more about things I remembered about our youths and said goodbye after a couple hours. I watched him walk away and was expecting that little kid shuffling his feet and kicking the rocks like he did 40 years ago. What I saw was a man who wasn’t given a chance as a child but beat all odds and is living a life of joy in his family and his beliefs. Again, all I could think was, “how did you breathe?”

I am astonished at the strength of these kids to have survived what they went through. They weren’t incredibly bright or anything, they just saw life as having no choice but to move on. I think B said it best when talking about how he could possibly believe in any kind of higher power. He said that he reached a point in his late teens where he was either going to give up or had to believe in something. He chose to believe. It occurred to me then that that was what allowed him to breathe.