Glen walked funny, bent forward a little with an uneven step, and was mentally challenged at a time when it was called retarded. He always wore those khaki-colored work pants from Penney’s with dirt from years of washing cars. A local service-station owner allowed him to make a little money that way. He cared for his aging mother or possibly they had cared for each other in a large, old, dilapidated house a few blocks from ours. My folks had always known the family and my dad had sort of taken Glen under his wing.
He’d regularly show up at our door, his head bowed with a slight self-conscious smile and a mumbled hello. Glen was always welcomed. Sometimes the coffee was on and he’d be offered a cup. Mom or dad would share whatever dessert we had around, usually pie. He would eat it shyly at the kitchen table, saying very little. Often Glen would bring freshly picked berries from a patch he kept or something from his garden. He never stayed long, but he came most every day.
As I grew up, Glen was kind of a fixture. He was always there and a normal part of our lives. Glen went with us on day trips huckleberry picking in the Blue Mountains of Idaho and trout fishing at a little lake nearby.
Only as a teen did I really notice Glen’s differences. With an expanding social awareness, I wondered at times about my parents’ complete acceptance of this little man. They were not introspective people and probably wouldn’t have had a profound reason—and I never asked. I began to notice that parents of other kids I knew didn’t hang out with people like Glen; their friends were more normal. I also realized that my folks were awfully unassuming, bordering, I thought, on naïve. They didn’t seem to care about being stylish in their acquaintances or their way of life. It wasn’t that I felt bad about that, but at times I hung out in my room a little longer with friends if Glen was having coffee and pie.
When my brother was old enough, dad took over a local Cub Scout pack. Mom helped him and they took it very seriously. Daddy built a special cupboard to hold all the miscellaneous Cub Scout stuff. Thirty years later it was still called the Cub Scout cupboard. Then they had an idea that tickled them both: They asked Glen to be their assistant. He blossomed; this unkempt little man would show up for the meetings with neatly combed hair, the cleanest pair of khaki pants he had and proudly wearing the Cub Scout shirt they’d given him with a scoutmaster patch on the sleeve. He talked more than I’d ever heard and helped the kids with all the activities as best he could.
The picture that appeared in the local paper of the pack and their newly carved Pinewood Derby cars captured Glen the background with a broad smile. When he came for pie, he would talk happily with my folks about the meetings, and we would all compliment him on the good work he was doing.
I remember the day my rather quiet dad received the call. It was from the parent of one of the scouts, a socially aware and active-in-the-community-type parent. “We feel that Glen is not a good influence to have around the boys,” he’d said. I had never seen my dad so mad. That night he put on his only sport coat, rarely worn, and donned a tie. He and Mom drove to the Scouting Council meeting.
I later learned that my dad had stood up in that room of people who lived in a more socially aware and educated world than he and told them how angry and embarrassed he was by their selfish attitudes and that if they demanded he not have Glen as his assistant, he would quit. They backed down.
Recently, as I listened to friends lament a dwindling sense of style, a loss of appreciation for the “finer edge” of life, I thought of Glen and my dad. Style, to me, is infused with very human qualities. In this case, one man’s humanity shown to another.
Marilyn Michael teaches a Thursday afternoon writing class at the Wallingford Community Senior Center in Wallingford’s Good Shephard Center http://www.wallingfordseniors.org
