"Survival" and what it means
Before we begin, a story. Like all the stories you’ll get from us, this one is true. I walked off a battlefield onto a college campus, Rutgers University in Newark, a commuter school in the heart of a gritty city, in the turbulent year 1969. I was a working-stiff, a veteran holding down several part-time jobs to supplement the miserly support of the G.I. Bill. During the school year I worked in fast food joints and tutored underclassmen in English composition. Summers I was full-time at the county parks department, running a playground in a large park in the western section of the city near a large public housing complex.
I knew Newark and thought I knew the problems my staff would face. Heroin, gangs, toughs up to no good. And indeed there was some of that -- pushers who would move on only when I dialed the local precinct for a patrol car; muscled thugs hanging around the basketball court looking for trouble instead of a good game of two-on-two. But my biggest problem turned out to be the kids, the little ones, who showed up every day by the dozens in the morning, left by men and women who ran for buses or hurried off on foot to jobs as cleaning ladies or battery mechanics, bus drivers and boiler makers.
It was de facto day care. The county hired me to organize leagues and work with teenagers (I was a former college athlete and former Marine), but I spent most of my time playing Candy Land, jumping rope and sitting under the great oaks, telling a circle of children a story and watching the wonder in their wide eyes.
I’d grown up with two sisters and four brothers so I didn’t mind. In fact I quickly came to look forward to my job, working with the kids. (Overseas, we ignored the children we encountered in villages and along the dusty roads, looking past their hunger and wretchedness, or treating them like pests, shooing them away with a rifle butt. Now, I thought, here was a chance to get my balance back. Treat children like children, like the innocents they were, and had a right to be.)
One morning, one bright August day around 7:30 a.m., I arrived in my red Volkswagan Beetle, parked in my usual spot on Mt. Vernon Place, fetched some gear from the car’s front boot, then walked slowly along the iron fence toward the opening that led to the pavilion where we set up shop every day. The park looked empty -- it always was that time of morning -- and then…then I spotted something in the large concrete sand box in front of the pavilion.
An animal, I thought, a tawny short-haired dog that had nestled itself in the sand. But as I got closer, then closer still, I realized that the lump in the middle of the sand box was no stray mutt. It was a child. I could not see his face at first, just his short dark hair; he was lying with his knees up under him, face down, his cheek on the sand. He was small – he looked so little in the middle of that big box -- maybe four, five years old, I guessed. And he wasn’t moving.
I put my hand gently on his back. He was warm. Then I could feel him breathing. I rubbed his back. He didn’t move. I rubbed a bit harder.
“Hi,” I said, “can you get up, big boy?”
He started to whimper, a child starved for sleep who didn’t want to wake. I scooped him up in my arms, gently brushed off the sand that was sticking to his cheek, and sat down on the side of the sandbox with the boy in my lap.
He was groggy, cranky. His faded yellow pajamas were in need of washing, and so was he. He started to rub his eyes with the back of his hand, but there still sand on his face, and he began to cry again.
“Okay, big boy, let me help.”
By now the rest of the staff was rolling in, and one of the women went to fetch the child some breakfast. We got him cleaned up and then started to question him. He told us his name – Danny or David, I think – and said his mother had dropped him off at the park. He didn’t know where he lived, where or whether his mother worked. All he knew was, she’d set him down in the sand box, he was tired and he went to sleep.
We knew what to do: procedure demanded we call the cops and child services. And after one of them came and took him away, we later got word that Danny or David was familiar to them, and so was his prostitute mother.
For weeks I thought about coming upon that kid. I was sure he’d been there for several hours before I arrived, a small boy in the middle of a Newark park in the dark sleeping in a sandbox. I knew where the authorities would take him -- a county children’s shelter in a large hospital-like building set ominously on a hill near a county golf course. Yes I knew that forlorn place. (Once a week I’d go there at night to tell stories to the children. They’d grab at me, pull at my clothes, cling to me when I’d walk out.) They’d hold him there for a while, maybe return him to his mother, or maybe put him in foster care, in those years a scandal in the making.
Before the cops showed up to fetch the boy, my staff and I had argued about all of this, but I cut the arguments short. “One of you going to take the child home?” I asked. Still, I understood the arguing. Some of them felt we were simply sending Danny David to another sandbox, dumping him as his mother had dumped him on us. “How will he survive?” one the women staff members asked.
It was a good question. I’d always thought of survival as heroic, behavior in extremis or under duress. Was surviving a night in a sandbox the same as surviving an enemy ambush in which half your company was killed or wounded? It never occurred to me that survival was an everyday act, that it could take as much courage, heart and hope to get through a night as it did through a battle.
Danny David must have been very brave that morning when his mother set him down on the edge of the box in the shadows and half-light. In my mind’s eye I can imagine him sitting there at first watching her walk away, then perhaps playing for a few minutes in the sand before fear convinced him to curl up and seek safety in sleep. We do not choose survival, said the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, it chooses us. Most scholars say that Skinner was talking about our response, as biological beings, to a hostile world. But Beth and I are going to take a different lesson from the story of Danny David.
Survival chooses us not because it is in our genes to keep going or because our environment conditions us to keep holding on. We survive because, as Terrence des Pres once suggested, we are “glad to be alive.” Maybe we are born with the knowledge that the bottom can drop out at any moment, or maybe we come into the world with an innate sense of finality and understand intuitively what the Japanese call our “one precious life.”
Whatever it is, we devote a good part of our culture to thinking and writing and portraying the subject of survival, offering one another our example, or the example of others, as a way to get through the day, recover from an illness, rebound from a loss, live with want, struggle against the daily undertow.
Here, in this space, we will collect stories of survival and, along with you, consider their meaning. Sometimes I will write the blog, sometimes Beth, two sensibilities applying themselves to the same subject. We look forward to your comments, your examples from everyday life or from the blogs and journals of others. Sometimes our offering might be comments on some famous text, a Camus essay perhaps, but most of the time we hope to draw on the experience of the world at large – the diary of a Los Angeles teacher, maybe a letter from a soldier (or civilian) in Iraq, a note from a small business owner on the Mississippi gulf coast or an office worker in Omaha.
Survival is both an individual and collective act, as much a part of life in good times and it is in bad. We want to know how people survive and what makes them survivors -- those moments that both test and reveal us to ourselves. We begin with a single idea, an idea free of any politics or dogma: The one thing that unites us all, the single quality we share, is our right to live. Along the way from the cradle to the grave we assume a number of other rights, other beliefs and ideas, but the right to live our lives is fundamental, universal, and inarguable. It’s what makes the individual collective. It’s why we spend so much time trying so hard to hold on.
Michael Norman
(Special thanks to Adam Penenberg for our theme)
