Mulch: Recess As A Disabled Kid

justinmartinwrites:

Mulch

It starts with a steep downward slant, so that if I were to let go of my wheels, the asphalt would send me careening down to the playground below. In the center of the playground, where it plateaus, a giant map of the world is painted, flanked to the south by twin tetherball sentries. To the north is the sea, wide and apathetic, whose waves would batter me for six years, made not out of water, but of mulch. The swings and the slides are there, so the kids are, too. If I was to try joining them, like I did in the early days, the tires of my manual chair would sink into the pellets, and I’d be completely immobile if I moved more than an inch into them. So my home became the shore between the land and the sea, where I spent a half-hour every day watching people play. I didn’t tell my parents that I cried when I got home, and it stayed that way for a while. After a time, I realized that the playground aides were watching me and probably feeling awful, so I at least moved around a little bit every day and pretended to have fun. I didn’t know how much this would prepare me for life in high school, where they took away the playground, but left the mulch.

The first time that I realized that the mulch could move was in third grade, when my elementary school, unwilling or unable to use the money my family had raised to replace the mulch with a rubberized surface that I could access, erected a boat in the corner of the mulch area, a bright red Play-Skool Stonehenge that was accessible by a rickety ramp and could rock back and forth. It really got the blood pressure pumping, let me tell you, and was the talk of the town amongst every tumbleweed on the playground. Nobody populated it whether or not I made the tenuous climb up there. (A special shout-out, however, goes to the guy that wrote “sex” in black Sharpie along the ship’s starboard bow, as if to consolidate all of the things that I could never have into one place.) I could look over the edge of the boat and see no mulch on any of its four sides, but I knew that the invisible variety of it was still there.

The mulch isn’t visible to most people.  You see it everywhere, but only if you know where to look. You see it when every lunch table fills up except yours until the seventh grade, when a few kids finally push past it and sit with you. You see it when, in gym class, an otherwise-sane teacher with all the subtlety of a Southern Baptists preacher begs people to pick you for their dodgeball team because you’re “the secret weapon, baby! The secret weapon!” You see it when, after watching a play at Bradley, all of the other theater kids make plans to go to a coffee shop that was two minutes from your house, and nobody asks you even though you’re right there.  You see it when small children try to touch your chair at the grocery store, and mothers slap their hands as if theirs tots have just made a covenant with Satan.

You see it, but the problem is that nobody else does. Hardly anyone, while they’re having fun on the swings and slides, or three seats ahead of you on a choir bus while you’re tied down in the back where nobody can hear you, or posting pictures on their Facebook of their homecoming, thinks that they’re leaving you out. I’m sure that the man who put that mulch down had no idea how much it was going to hurt me: in fact, when my parents finally heard about the problem and asked school administrators why the mulch was there in the first place, nobody had a good answer, but nobody was in any hurry to do anything.

That’s not to say that, when kids are forced off of the mulch, they don’t hang out with you. I used to thank God every time snow would come down, and everyone would have to stay inside for recess, when we’d all play games of checkers or build robots out of connectable toy blocks. I’ve somehow managed to fight my genetics enough to be fairly good at bowling with bumpers, and some of the most mulch-destroying moments of my life have been the seconds before a perfect strike, when a tenor who maybe sees me as a little more human than he did two seconds ago helps me set up the perfect angle. But sooner or later, through no fault of their own, everyone who is able to do so drifts back to the more familiar objects, the shinier ones, and there you are on the border looking in again.         

I’m back at my elementary school playground. My freshman year of high school had just ended, and I’ve changed in a hundred ways from the last time I was there. I’m in a power wheelchair, for one thing, sitting next to a boy who I think I might like a little too much and another one who I’d have never guessed I’d spend any time with.  It’s maybe nine o'clock at night, nine-thirty tops, and Ohio is welcoming the beginning of a storm that comes down like the wrath of God, reverberating off of the cheap pastel plastic of the swings and slides like a ten-pound bucket of ping-pong balls spilled over the perimeter of my childhood. I hadn’t come back to make some grand statement: I’d been at a bonfire where a few friends and I had burnt all of that year’s homework. We’d gotten tired of hanging out in someone’s garage, and Hilliard Crossing’s asphalt jungle was about a five-minute walk from there. But here I was, a question and its answer rising in my head to greet each other in tandem: could I go on the mulch now? Yes.

I skated over it as easily as ice. I paused for a second to taste morsels of a rapturous happiness that had come with the rain and the electricity in my wheels. “This is what I’ve worked for”, I thought, “this is finally what I deserve”. And then, though nobody saw, I cried. Now, yes, I could get onto the place I’d wanted to be for so many years, but everybody else had already moved on to some other place with even more pointless mulch around it. I guess I’ll spend the next sixteen years going after wherever that is. landing in another empty playground.