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I knew how badly my mother and father wanted me to fit in, and the smiles that lit up their faces while sitting at that table were worth the daily pain of my isolation.
“And I wanted to thank you for being such a good friend to Ernie.” “You’re welcome,” I replied, though her comment confused me. Being Ernie’s friend had been the easiest thing about school, and, if anything, I should have been thanking him. Without him, I’d have still been on the bleachers.
I was not mad at Ernie for leaving me. Nor did I consider him responsible for what had happened. My refusal to look at Ernie came from my abject embarrassment, my humiliation to have a friend, my only friend, see me so weak and helpless.
The only place I found comfort, outside my home, was in church. I could take off my glasses and feel normal. Everything God does is for a reason, Sam; every cross we bear is an opportunity. Do you understand?” “I think so,” I said, though I was becoming less sure I wanted to understand.
The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.”
This time I did not hesitate to say it. “You look beautiful.” I did not feel the least bit self-conscious saying it. I was stating a fact, like looking at a waterfall and calling it breathtaking. “Really. Really beautiful.”
“Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
I reached out and hugged her. The tears we shed that morning were our silent acknowledgment that while the years might not have been extraordinary, as she had so diligently prayed, they had been ours. Come the fall, I would be leaving for college and my mother would lose her little boy, and I would lose the person who had always been there for me, my fiercest advocate since the day I’d been born.
I recall this moment as the moment I became a man. It had not been my first beer or hangover, or the first time I’d gotten laid, as I had thought. It had not even been earlier that day, when I’d tossed my blue graduation cap into the air. It was the moment my mother needed me, and I was there for her.
The strangest part was that I realized that by forgiving them all, I had forgiven myself.
