Helen Wright, Elementary

I tumbled into human service work. Or more accurately, I slipped and slid, like a character in a movie who, when escaping danger, runs down a steep hill and then rolls and bounces every few hundred feet.

Looking back I find my tether to the world of service tied to one unassuming summer morning. My grandmother and I are standing on the playground of an elementary school. Not the one I attend, the school named for the giant palm trees that provide its shade, but another one, a little further inland. The children are tiny whirlwinds of elbows, smiles, and tennis shoes, a bouncing blur of arms and legs. Grandma is working during the summer. Normally by this time of year we are at the beach down the street from her house where my brother and I stay most of the time. On this particular day, though, she is standing in her work attire: striped shirt, khaki skirt, and navy blue Keds. Her hair is tied back with an elastic, as she calls them, and she has a pencil tucked behind her ear. Her lipstick, her only affectation, is red. I don’t know what work she does, but it seems like she is the only one here and she seems to be kind of running things. She wants me with her and she wants me to be excited about it. That much I understand.

The program is called Head Start, but I don’t really know what it means. She doesn’t say the phrase the way we do when we say we are going to give someone a head start. Instead she says the words together, headstart, and I can only see that it means a place, kind of small, kind of sparse, with a bunch of little kids who are bouncing off of the playground equipment. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be doing. “Just play with them,” she says. Is she kidding? This will lead to a black eye or broken arm for sure. When she asks me later what I think, I am honest, not understanding any of what she has been up to and probably disappointing her. She never brings me again. But it doesn’t matter. That impression of her on the playground, half smiling in her red lipstick, a cyclone of children swirling around her while she stands with her hand in the pocket of her skirt, comes back to me again and again. There she is, lending herself to a cause on a summer day. It’s who she is.

Later at my elementary school where my grandmother is also the school secretary, she enlists me again and again to help. Help cover the reception desk at lunch. Help the kids in the portables who are having trouble learning to read. Help out in the classrooms for kids with disabilities. Grandma relishes work. It is her fealty, her devotion. One day they will build a school in our town and she will be nominated to have it named after her: Helen Wright. Instead, it is named after one of her best friends, the superintendent and later mayor of our town, Truman Benedict. I imagine it was he who nominated her because he realized that she would be remembered for the way she served our community from the school under the palms, and he was right. I still hear from people, now close to retirement themselves, who remember “Mrs. Wright”.

Many years later, when I tell my grandmother that I am enrolling in nursing school, she winces. “Be a doctor,” she says. But, I have never wanted to be a doctor. There was a brief week or two one summer when, inspired by the business checkbook that she kept in a drawer, I thought that I wanted to play doctor’s… office. I thought that the doctor’s office smelled nice and seemed tidy and manageable, like a bank. Plus, it had Highlights Magazine. But that dream didn’t take root. Most of the time my working dream for my life, more of a wish really, was to find a way to tie the wooden, heart-shaped box that I had in my bedroom around my neck and fill it with fragments of poetry and scripture and beautiful ideas. “How do I love thee,” “Narrow fellow in the grass,” “Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me.” If I had a plan, that was it. Fill the heart-shaped box with words and sayings and wear it around my neck for ready reference and sharing.

I have been equally imprinted by my grandfather, a singer who was relegated to a swivel rocker with tweed upholstery after one too many DUIs and an inglorious dunk in the Santa Ana “drunk tank”. My brother and I spent most days of our childhood with him as he, baked, made pottery, smoked, watched TV, gardened, read Ripley’s Believe it Or Not and imprinted us with his wry humor and style. He was more or less a model prisoner (with liquor on his breath) in an Angora sweater. It is between these two parental poles that I now float like the blip on the Pong game that we used to play at the dentist’s office. Overwork, over care, elbow grease, make a difference. Boop. Recline, research, wink at the world. Boop. Scratch and claw back into some semblance of meaning and efficacy. Boop. Float back into the deepest desire to be home, puttering.

As I grew, my grandmother constantly asked me what I thought I wanted to “be” when I became an adult. The idea was to really go for something. Paleontologist, I learned, was the term for someone who searched for fossils and bones. Bones and dirt made me breathless then and still do. A school trip to see the La Brea tarpits in Los Angeles ignited that passion. Or biologist, if that was what Jane Goodall was. She wore khaki and went bare foot most of the time and tied her hair back with an elastic. She crouched quietly and looked at the world through binoculars, learning, waiting. That seemed like fun. And then, after a field trip to the Los Angeles Times where my best friend’s dad worked as an editor, I thought I wanted to be a reporter thanks to the little silver letters of typeface that they gave us to take home and a thrilling moment watching the web press at work, a crazy sci-fi iteration of the heart-shaped box. I became more than momentarily serious about the possibilities of becoming a news writer, or columnist and joined the school newspaper.

Grandpa for his part encouraged me to be an interpreter. Thanks to his tutorials from The French Chardenal, I learned to love foreign language, studying three at once in school. That is, until my brother and I moved unexpectedly with our parents to a place where foreign language wasn’t offered. My grandfather still rooted for me from his tweed chair, now 1400 miles away, and sent gift certificates for gas money so that I could commute to college and $50 for a bag to carry my books. But secretary, nurse’s aid, minister? The jobs that have occupied so many of the years of my working life were still nowhere in my mind. It wasn’t until I had a fight with my dad and fled our house when I was seventeen, for safety, that I started that tumble down the hill, battered and bruised with a mouthful of dirt. I became a nurse’s aid, same as his mom, a day laborer. Someone he could recognize, though he hated it.

Watching The Big Valley and High Chaparral with Grandpa when we were kids, I noticed that the cowboys, especially the ones with the white hats, used a funny word: obliged: “Much obliged, ma’am.” It sounded like an old-fashioned word for thank you. To my ears it has a religious connotation. Oblates are lay people who live in religious community and take vows. But the word obliged shares more obvious meaning with the word obligation and upon even further examination also shares a root with the word religion. Ligare, to connect or tie up, to bandage or wrap, to unite.

When we moved away from our grandparents’ home, I didn’t have a concept of grief and wouldn’t have even named those feelings of separation as homesickness, if I had been aware of them at all. But I wasn’t aware of them, because bruises and scrapes tend to go numb when deep tissue is involved. When the pain finally did surface, I found other people’s grandparents who were hurting, too, because they had given up or lost their homes, and we all sort of worked it out together. Helping is a meaningful option for managing pain. I think we do it naturally.

One of the first people I visited as a volunteer at the nursing home was a woman named Bess. Bess told me that there are two things to do when one is feeling blue 1) take a walk in the woods and 2) do something for someone else. Anything. Just look for something to do. As I write this I wonder, did Bess wonder why a 17-year-old was giving up a sunny Saturday to visit her? Did she guess about the sadness?

But there is more to this story than simply bandaging pain by uniting with another’s. It goes back to that cowboy’s hat tip. “Much obliged, ma’am.” My grandparents rescued my brother and me and made it look easy with their home-cooked meals and place mats on the table, with their ice cream and Hershey’s syrup, with the endless lessons at Helen Wright Elementary: “Listen here, honey, I want to show you something.”

I never stopped to think about it, never wondered, about why we shared a bedroom, my brother and I, and had no clothes in the dresser at our grandparents’ home. No toys apart from the games in the game cabinet, a ream of typing paper for scribbling, and a stack of comic books on our shared nightstand. Or why neither one of us can remember how many days of how many weeks we were there. I never stopped to wonder what it meant for our grandparents, either, if it was difficult for them. All I know, is that when I think of home it’s to that little shared bedroom that I return, that house with towels that smelled like the sun, garden boxes out back where Grandpa grew tomatoes, and our coffee cans full of mud and jars of polliwogs on the patio table. Our grandparents’ home was our home, we assumed, until it wasn’t any longer.

For those great years when I could have been lost but was instead held, I am obliged to my grandmother for her example and bound to offer back what I can in her name.