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Lightning Bugs
It was just a little, dancing ball of light, ten feet in front of me. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Of course, I knew what it was from movies, books, and teammates, but that didn't stop me, jaw agape, from following the little bug on its zigzag path toward the water.
It was dusk at camp. My team had arrived that day, knowing only a few details of what we were about to undertake for the next seven weeks. We knew that we were going to Easter Seals Camp Lindahl in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., a camp for physically and mentally disabled children and adults. We knew that we would be assisting campers in everything they did—we would feed them, help them shower, even change their diapers. There was hard work coming and much to do, but for the moment I was content to watch the movements of that one little ball of light, and I followed it for a long time.
During our sixth week, my camper was a tall, skinny, 15-year-old black girl named Renee. Renee had cerebral palsy, which caused her to walk with one foot turned inward and her chest puffed slightly outward. She limped, and her balance was bad. Renee also had a mild mental delay and a great deal of difficulty with details. She never remembered my name, and needed even the smallest instructions to be repeated several times.
Sometimes she was brash. Whenever we walked into a room together, she'd shout out in her big, booming voice, 'What's up, y'all!"
This was her first time at camp. During registration, I watched her father stare blankly at the forms he was handed and realized that he was illiterate. When asked, 'What is the nature of your daughter's disability?" he shrugged and stuttered, looking lost. "I'm bowlegged," Renee told me later. She wrapped her mouth around the words in the slow drawl of a Tennessean. I learned from her file that her mother was dead. A social worker came on the second day to bring her a swimsuit.
"We've been trying to get Renee out here for along time," the social worker said. "This is really exciting for us."
I took Renee swimming for her first time. She wore a lifejacket and clung to the side of the pool, laughing nervously.
"You're gonna stay with me, right?" she asked repeatedly. "You're not going to leave?"
"Of course not," I answered. "Not if you don't want me to."
There was a dance on the last night of each session. At dinner that night I sat down exhausted, my head pounding. Renee began to bang her fork and knife on the table, chanting, 'WE WANT TO EAT, WE WANT TO EAT!"
"Renee," I pleaded, "please don't. I really can't handle it right now." She put her silverware down, but five minutes later she picked up her half-full glass of iced tea and began to turn it slowly to its side, until the liquid was at the very edge, ready to spill onto the table. She looked at me as she did this. I could feel the blood rushing to my face.
"If you don't put that down right now, there will be no dance tonight!" I snapped. They were words coming from somewhere else, like a movie villain or the mean teacher everyone hates. I didn't know I had them in me. I felt sick to my stomach.
The dance was held at the pavilion, a large, covered area by the lake that was lined with tiki torches for the occasion. As soon as we stepped onto the floor, Renee began bobbing her head and swaying her arms, moving her feet slowly at first, then more quickly and rhythmically, in perfect time with the music. I smiled. At first I was a little nervous that she'd fall over, but she was a terrific dancer.
As I looked through the crowd, I could see all my teammates. Weather dancing with a camper, helping clean up, or goofing off with other counselors, I could see in each of them a reflection of everything we'd worked for during the year, every challenge we'd overcome. I could see how we'd all grown into the people we were now. Flickering torchlight reflected off of their faces, just as it did mine and Renee's, and for an instant, everything around me shone.
On the final morning, while walking to breakfast, Renee burst into tears. "I don't want to leave."
"It's okay," I said lamely. "You can always come back next year." She cried on my shoulder while we sat outside and waited for her father.
"I don't want to go home! It's boring and everyone ignores me."
"Renee, what you should do is, tell your dad when you get home that you want to take swimming lessons. That would be fun, wouldn't it?" I thought this was something that could possibly be arranged through the social worker. Her father's car pulled up. She looked at me. Tears that hadn't yet worked their way down her cheeks hovered in her eyelids.
"Are you going to walk me partway?" she asked.
"Renee," I stuttered, stunned by the honesty of her simple request. "I...I'll walk you all the way."
Later, as I walked into twilight, the lightning bugs came out. After six weeks at camp, I had begun to see the lightning bugs as something ordinary —not that they were mundane, I realized that their shine is a part of another light, the light that we al give off, to each other, to the world around us, every day—so often that we rarely notice we're doing it. |
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