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Learning to walk

John Krueger

Darcy didn’t expect to meet a truck veering across the sidewalk on her way to school. But she did. In a split second, life was forever altered for this eight-year-old girl from Ancaster, Ont. The driver screeched to a halt, and then saw enough blood to shake him into sobriety. Front doors were flung open, and neighbours poured out of their suburban homes. Mothers cupped their hands over the eyes of their preschoolers and screamed for someone to call an ambulance. Then they glared in disgust at the sullen figure who slouched on the bumper of his truck, shaking.

Darcy’s mother stared at the cross in the St. Joseph’s Hospital waiting room. But it was her father who took up a post at the hospital for ten days straight. (John Dee was a director at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, and later went on to star as “Max”, the shopkeeper in the Canadian TV comedy series, King of Kensington.) He was good with words, but could now only groan “Why?” as he paced the corridors and waiting room. He remembered how Darcy had used to chant with her friends, “Husha, husha, we all fall down”, but the impact of steel on flesh was too much, and for days her life hung in the balance. Doctors didn’t know if she’d ever come out of her coma. Three months after the accident, there was a stirring. First her fingers scratched the bedsheet, and then her eyelids fluttered. Darcy tried to recall what had happened, but the blow to her head had wiped her memory clean like a brush sliding over a child’s chalkboard.

Five months after the accident, Darcy finally made it to school, in a wheelchair. The Lord may look upon the heart of a person, but grade three boys do not. The ringleader, Mike, would squat on his haunches in front of Darcy, cross his eyes, stick out his tongue and flail his arms in spastic circles. Remarkably, she laughs about it now, especially how in grade eight she cornered Mike at a school social and yelled in front of his friends, “Hey Mike, wanna dance?” He said, “I’d love to, Darce, but I’ve got a sprained arm.”

After several operations, she was fitted with a leg brace and forearm crutches. Thirty years later, I met Darcy at Welcome Inn Mennonite Church in Hamilton, Ont. Now she kicks her foot out in front of her like I used to in order to fling my penny loafers as a kid. Only this is no game. It’s called “walking”. In church, I notice Darcy’s fingers stiffen and flare, and then she starts a rhythmic movement with her hand, like she’s keeping beat to a tune in her head. I lean towards her because the accident skewed her speech so that she rides vowels with a nasal sound. Many times, I look at her sheepishly and say, “I didn’t get that.” She pats me on the head for being so dense, and we try again.

One day, I drove Darcy back to her childhood home and the accident site. She was raised in the kind of town which has a bylaw prohibiting residents from hanging their laundry outside, a 1950s Leave-It-To-Beaver neighbourhood with an Avon Lady at the door. I looked over at the crumpled figure sitting in the front seat of my car. She no longer fit in that neighbourhood, if she ever did. Then I slowed the car at the corner where it had happened. The only thing marking this life-changing patch of real estate was a red mailbox. I expected to feel despair, but, amid all the sadness, I sensed I was approaching holy ground – entering a mystery – even if it was the mystery of suffering. Perhaps because the Lord is close to those who are crushed in body and spirit, when we befriend them, we, too, are enriched.

Journalist Richard Gilman helped me realize that the best way to move beyond pity for people like Darcy is simply to get to know them personally.

Darcy Dee and John Krueger

Then their appearance is somehow absorbed into the beauty of their presence, even transformed by it.

In all our relationships, it’s the verbs which change us – when we throw the ball, play the clown, wrap the gift, phone the lonely, hug the weeping and pray the blessing. I used to assume that I could activate my will if I poured enough truth into my brain. But, after hearing hundreds of sermons, I was fast becoming a pew potato. Knowledge, which was so vital to my Christian growth in its early going, had a way of piling up in my mind’s storage room in later years. Perhaps this is true for many of us. After we think we know far more than we do, God sends the weak and the wounded, the foolish and the fearful into our congregations to be our teachers and spiritual directors. He sent Darcy to teach me how to walk.

John Krueger is a freelance writer and a career counsellor at Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ont.

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Last modified April 19, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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