I've got nothing to write about today, so I'll do something different. I'm gonna give out a rose. You know how they say you should give people their roses while they can still smell them, so here's one for my grandmother.
I went to Benjamin Banneker High School. Back when I was there, it was one of the best public schools in the city. I know it sounds like an exaggeration but they worked us like rented mules. I'm talking homework every night in just about every class. Unlike the little "bastardlings" of DC who went to high school each morning carrying a spiral notebook and a crayon, we had to take home every textbook every day. You could easily spot a Banneker Achiever by looking for the kids with scoliosis carrying home a 40 pound backpack.
Backpacks have a lifespan of about six months at that school and mine was no different. The straps ripped off one day while I was running for the bus and over the course of the next week I found myself sewing them back in place everyday. It was all for naught, because at the end of that week the entire bottom of my backpack ripped open, spewing all of my stuff on the platform of the metro. I needed a new backpack.
Now this was during the winter of our discontent...literally. Our gas, heat and hot water was off due to "budgeting irregularities" so a new "good quality" backpack was at the bottom of my family's wish list. My mother said she was broke and told me to "just carry my books." I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that because I didn't live with her, she thought I was exaggerating when I said I had 40 lbs of books. So that left my grandmother who was on a fixed income and who told me in a calm reassuring voice, "I aint got no damn money."
For the next week I carried my History, English, Spanish, Algebra II/Trig, Chemistry and Health textbooks along with my TI-83, Spiral Notebooks, 3-ring binder, lunch and track practice clothes in several plastic grocery store bags. I looked so pathetic that my friends started taking up a collection to buy me a new backpack.
So one day I'm sitting in homeroom about twenty minutes before school lets out and I get called into the office. Sitting on the counter was a new backpack. The dungeon dragon who ran the office told me, "Your grandmother came up here right before lunch with that thing for you. She wanted me to call you to the office but I told her that we don't interrupt classes and upset the learning process just because a family member wants to see a student. If it isn't an emergency then she'll just have to wait. So she left."
Not wanting to curse the dungeon dragon out (again) I took the bag and went back to my homeroom. I was already on the verge of tearing up, because I knew my grandmother didn't have any money. I knew that the only way she was able to buy it was to skimp on paying some bill. I kept it all inside though. I opened it up to put my books in it and that's when I saw that she'd put a two piece meal from Popeyes inside. I lost it.
I ran out the classroom tears streaming out of my eyes and went to the payphone to call home. The dean of students asked why I was in the hall and I walked around her like she wasn't even there. I call home and my grandmother answers and tells me that she JUST got home. In the interest of time, I'll just tell you what happened in classic Scooby Doo fashion.
She had 45 dollars. She spent 40 on the backpack and the bus fare to get up to my school. She had $5 left to get back home but that's when she thought about the rough week I'd had and wanted to do something nice for me. She used the last $5 to buy me some Popeyes and planned to get a dollar from me to get back home on the bus but because the dungeon dragon wouldn't call me out of class she had no way to get home, so she walked all the way home from my school which is across from Howard University all the way back to her house near RFK Stadium which is almost a two hour walk.
I thanked her repeatedly. I hung up the phone, cried a little bit inside the phone booth and then wiped my eyes and headed directly into the office where I proceeded to slay the dungeon dragon in what is probably, by far, the best "cuss out" ever delivered. It was so effective that after that me and the dragon became friends.
It may not seem like much to other people, but that happened during one of the most tumultuous periods of my life and that seemingly small gesture remains, to this day, the most sincere display of love I've ever felt. And for that...I thank you.
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