You don't know Jack...

Jack still walks the streets.

Jack S. has been on the periphery of my life for 40 years. I first became aware of Jack while I was in junior high. He was a "slow learner" in the "special ed" classes, separated from the rest of us as mainstreaming was still three decades away. Jack walked slowly, talked slowly and learned slowly, but was unfailingly polite and would talk to anyone who would listen to him. And of course, we all ignored him.

Jack lived at the very far end of my neighborhood and would ride his bicycle everywhere as a teenager and later as an adult because due to his mental capacity and physical limitations he would never get a driver's license. He would smile and wave and stop to talk if you made any sort of eye contact, which most of us avoided doing.

As an adult Jack once again made his presence known when I started working at the police department as a dispatcher working the midnight shift. Jack was a bit of an insomniac and had a police radio so he would listen to our calls and he quickly became familiar with the voices of the newly hired dispatchers and would call in the quiet, early hours. It was easy to talk to him then and we would let him go on, talking about trains and engineers and how someday he would get a job working on a train. Jack always had big plans to get a job, you see. Sometimes we would be too busy to talk to Jack so we would transfer him down to the jail to talk to the jailers or tell him to call a different police department (because he called them all equally) or just tell him we couldn't talk. We did that a lot, especially after Jack was hit by a car while riding his bike and was no longer able to ride around for exercise and entertainment; his parents took away his bike as it was becoming too dangerous for him to ride on the streets with more traffic on the roads and so he called people to maintain that contact with the outside world.

After I quit the PD and started traveling upon visits home we would see Jack walking the long street that runs along the side of Mom's house, usually wearing his train engineer's hat and his bib overalls and totally intent on his destination, wherever that might be. Denny and I would smile and say "there's Jack, still walking!" and "Wonder if he still calls the PD?" And we'd go our merry way.

We saw Jack yesterday; still in his engineer's cap eight years later, still walking that long street beside Mom's house, but even slower now. He's gotten smaller and his beard is white. I so often feel like a kid when I return home to visit and we stay at Mom's, but I remembered yesterday that Jack and I were born the same year.

I wish I had been nicer when he used to call.