CW: Violence, abuse, and murder of vulnerable people and animals discussed in the Of Mice and Men section.

I visited Boston last weekend and stopped by my old home to see my parents and my brother. Before I left, my dad made sure I rifled through a box of some old middle school papers and materials. I sifted through, recycling some obviously useless vestiges from my prep school days. Binders stuffed with calculus tests, journals consisting entirely of noun declensions and verb conjugations.

There was one paper, though, that captured my attention: a first draft of a personal narrative marked up by my English teacher. That was a legendary paper—a paper that I don’t even need a physical copy to avoid forgetting.

The Personal Narrative Assignment

You see, this paper was the first a teacher pulled me aside about and urged me to publish in the school journal. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the most eagerly engaged English student back then. I liked grammar, but reading and writing stressed me out. And so this felt like a big deal. What that teacher, Mr. C, saw for the first time in that paper was my personal voice. I can now see how this paper began a lineage of many evolving attempts to explain who I am.

I still remember the evening I wrote this personal narrative. I paced around and got a stomachache, as I often did when I faced an open-ended assignment. It’s not that I was at a loss for stories; I found myself often thinking of simpler times, like the infamous sledding accident at my third-grade birthday party and other fun times with my elementary school friends. The problem was that all these stories seemed shallow compared to the one I knew, but didn’t realize, I needed to tell.

Of Of Mice and Men

A few days before, Mr. C, a fatherly young man with a blond beard that was the correct look for a lacrosse-coach-plus-English-teacher, gave our class an unusual exercise. He decided, essentially, to segregate our English class. (I know “segregate” is a strong word—and I don’t mean racially—but you’ll see why.)

We had read the last chapters of Of Mice and Men, a novel by John Steinbeck that chronicles the travels of two Californian migrant workers, George and Lennie. The two farm workers share an old-married-couple kind of friendship, with Lennie, an intellectually disabled man, reliant on George, who resentfully but ultimately lovingly cares for his friend. George promises Lennie that one day, they will be able to live off the fat of the land all on their own, and tend to a farm with their very own animals. But Lennie’s odd and careless behaviors, such as petting mice so forcefully that he accidentally kills them, escalate into more troubling incidents. Lennie kills a puppy, by mistake. Even more horrifically, while flirting in a barn with his boss’s daughter-in-law, Lennie pets the woman’s hair too strongly. When she cries out, Lennie tries to silence her, and in doing so, snaps her neck.

As the men at the ranch discover the news and gather a lynch party to pursue Lennie, George hurries to the meeting place he established with Lennie should they ever get in trouble. George finds Lennie, assuring him that he is not angry, and promises him again that one day they will live peacefully on their own farm together and live off the land. As the sound of the approaching lynch party grows, George shoots his friend in the back of the head.

So, what about the segregation thing?! Mr. C asked our class, point-blank, “Was George in the right or in the wrong to kill his best friend?” He asked us to stand up from the Harkness table—the oval discussion table that leveled us with the teacher—and choose to stand on either side of the classroom. Anyone condoning George’s decision was to stand on one side of the room, and anyone condemning it was to stand on the other side of the room.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understood even back then why George did what he did, but I stood in a corner with the other two anti-George kids and faced the thirteen who disagreed. Maybe it was my religious upbringing (“Thou shalt not kill”), or my mom’s vegetarianism, or something about the deceptive nature of George’s assault that influenced my stance. But what truly did it for me is that I instinctively substituted my own brother, Luke, for Lennie.

My brother is disabled in many ways, including intellectual disability. He cannot take care of himself and does not always understand how his actions can impact or hurt people. And for all his delightful joy, he really can hurt people—he has caused more emotional and physical damage than even some of my closest friends could quite fathom—and yet my brother is also a human being. The idea that a vulnerable adult lacking evil intent and requiring other’s help for survival could deserve or ethically require harm or death—yes, even given the danger they pose to others—was sickening to me. And the idea that George’s mercy kill prevented what would have been a far crueler demise in the hands of the justice system? I just didn’t care. To kill was too terrible, whoever did the act.

I knew that my reasoning was more emotional than rational, and so did the other two guys on my side. The three of us seemed to feel that, more than anything, this all just felt very wrong. Thirteen guys in half-tucked-in polo shirts in favor of a “mercy kill,” mouths full of straightened teeth adjudicating the ending of an adult life because George decided for Lennie that it was for his own good? Pragmatism—and some might even argue, love—tells us we can sometimes determine and enforce what is for others’ good.

My school inculcated the primacy of the mind over the soul as a core concept from day one. At Beaver Brook, the special overnight retreat in New Hampshire that new “sixies” (seventh graders) embark on, we watched the classic film 12 Angry Men. One brave juror used facts and reason to slowly dismantle the other eleven jurors’ animosity towards the defendant. That one juror swayed the jury, one crisp observation at a time, and the defendant was thankfully adjudicated innocent.

I don’t probably have to explain to you the false dichotomy of emotion and reason at the heart of secularism, but suffice it to say that I didn’t know it was a false dichotomy back then. I just knew that the reasoning of the thirteen who approved of George’s “mercy kill” felt cold and callous to me. Again, I really did understand Lennie’s obvious danger to himself and others. And I felt empathetic, too, towards him, and empathy is a heavy burden. And standing in that corner with two other dissenters in an island of irrational empathy? That felt very heavy indeed.

Finding My Voice

Well, I devised no brilliant retort in the corner of that English classroom. But as I paced up and down the stairs of my home trying to decide what to write for my personal narrative assignment, a passage from Of Mice and Men replayed in my mind:

“Go on,” said Lennie. “How’s it gonna be. We gonna get a little place.”

“We’ll have a cow,” said George. “An’ we’ll have maybe a pig an’ chickens… an’ down the flat we’ll have a… little piece alfalfa-“

“For the rabbits,” Lennie shouted.

“For the rabbits,” George repeated.

“And I get to tend the rabbits.”

“An’ you get to tend the rabbits.”

Lennie giggled with happiness. “An’ live on the fatta the lan’.”

“Yes.”

Once more, I felt sick to my stomach, but this time, it was about George murdering his best friend. And once more, I thought of Luke. Lennie… Luke. Lennie, Luke.

And then the personal narrative assignment wrote itself.

“Luke”

The children of the playground, abandoned by watchful mothers, were left to know strangers and dance in spasmodic rhythms of protective rubber and plastic. Parents secretly hoped that their children would grow bored of their playground rituals. At the park, the shade of trees muted the summer heat. The sand pit, and the great holes dug in it, were now replaced with safer wood chips. The new wood chips reeked like manure.

I was one of the children, but I usually came to the playground alone. The children I met knew what the alphabet was, or discovered how to fetch water from the fountains to wet the wood chips. All of the children trusted me, whether I had met them already or not. But when a kid named Luke would come to the playground, I noticed fear and confusion in both the parents and the children.

One day, someone found some sort of grasshopper. The children cried “whoa, grasshopper!” and “little bug!” A few minutes later, Luke arrived. His Personal Care Assistant, Hannah, brought him to a bench, and he proceeded to simultaneously watch us and receive tickles on his arm from Hannah. She was probably Luke’s favorite Personal Care Assistant, and I’ve enjoyed conversations with her about a variety of things.

Someone decided that the grasshopper wasn’t interesting anymore, so we played tag. The children, soon noticing Luke at his bench, began to ask me questions like, “Who is that kid?” and “Is that your brother?” Every time I would explain to them, they would stand motionlessly and stare at Luke, or simply walk away.

Luke is my older brother. He sits in a wheelchair and has conditions like cerebral palsy, heart disease, and deformed feet. He grinned as I walked towards him. Luke asked for a “hugaga,” a hug, but he immediately pushed me away. Then he pointed at something in the distance. I’ve never understood what he points at, or why he enjoys pointing at things.

A little girl asked Hannah why Luke’s feet were surrounded by braces, and after Hannah’s reply, she stared at him intently for a few seconds before leaving. I asked Luke, “What’s up,” to which he repeated the word “ba” (his name for me), and then some “gaga,” too.

Luke must have been thinking about us children of the playground as we played our absurd rituals and games. He has had to sit and watch us many, many times, and to ward off the guilt that I felt, I attacked Luke with tickles that made him laugh.

The parents dragged their children away as the cooler air made the impending evening more apparent. Some of the parents stared at Luke for a moment as they passed us on their way out, thinking that no one saw them staring. Most light abandoned the playground. Hannah told me that we had to leave in a minute, so I looked for the grasshopper. It had left, too. Luke sat in his wheelchair, pushed by Hannah, and I followed them out of the playground.