Mark Watson
I had an exceptionally happy childhood draped in countless adventures with friends, brothers and two never-could-be-duplicated parents.
So, I ask myself, why have I spoken mostly of traumas? I think it is because the traumas we recall seem to stick up like weeds on a nicely mowed lawn.
Like Mark Watson, the only other person I would ever know who struggled so between the black art of invisibility and the desire for acceptance. There is a Mark Watson in everybody’s life. Now, even sixty-five years later, when I think of Mark, I still cringe with self-loathing.
He was a slightly odd new kid in class, so anxious to make a friend that he became the brunt of the kind of cruel jokes children are capable of.
At a class party of sorts, Mark and I were the two self-designated wall flowers when it came time for everyone to sit at a long table to enjoy some cake. It was then that a fun idea came to me that I was sure the “mob” would enjoy. When Mark followed me to the cake table I kindly offered him a chair and as he turned and sat, I pulled it away. He hit the floor in a humiliating sprawl and the class exploded in cackles of laughter.
His eyes were welling with tears as he pulled himself up, staring at me. He was completely broken and then ran out. It was the kind of look that eats your heart and burns into your brain forever.
At Mark’s expense I learned one of the most valuable lessons of life. The next morning, I became Mark’s friend but never forgot what I was capable of if I simply followed the mob.
It is easy, comfortable, and safe to follow the mob. It is why, I suppose, so many are mob followers today, rather than taking the harder, lonelier, more constructive road of thinking for oneself.
I would feel a debt to Mark Watson later in life, as I tried to be one of the constructive, and would, at least in part, thank Mark for it.
Anyway, arriving at school that next morning I became Mark’s friend. Arriving, I saw some in the class were doing their best to have a little more fun with Mark. They had grabbed the cap off his head and surrounded him, tossing it around in a circle. Mark, upset and on the verge of tears again (a schoolboy taboo of galactic proportions), was desperately trying to retrieve it. As I walked up, Mark glanced at me and just gave up, going over and taking a seat on a bench.
Thinking I was now part of the game, one in the mob suddenly tossed the hat to me. I turned my back on the mob and walked over and sat next to Mark placing it on his head. Not done with their fun, my classmates came over to snatch it off Mark’s head again, but that did not happen, and Mark and I had my reputation from the fancy-dancer Rudy fight to thank for it.
I may have done things worse in my life than jerk that chair out from under Mark Watson, but none that ever made me feel smaller or where I learned more.
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