Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Mom and Dad were consumed by preparing me for the world outside our living room. That meant frequent trips to doctors and specialists and physical therapists, frequent examinations and X-rays, followed by the process of sorting through the results, opinions, and recommendations. As I neared kindergarten, they wondered if I’d be allowed into the public elementary school in the neighborhood and, if I was, if I could cope with it. With that approaching, we spent a little more time on the structural side of my handicap, which meant more time at the Mott Children’s Hospital and consultations with the Crippled Children’s Fund, which, in spite of its ghastly name, did ease the financial burden on the family—now a family of four with the addition of Chad. By then, while Mom made some money teaching and prepared to go to law school, Dad was working long days as a meter reader and meat cutter to keep the lights on, the furnace lit, and everybody fed. Yes, a meter reader. I wasn’t even sure there were parking meters in Flint. Like I said, complicated.

  In each doctor’s office, the initial consultation began the same way: a long look at my right arm and a question, posed inoffensively: “What happened here?” Of course my parents had no answer. After more inquiries, all of them predictably about the nature of the pregnancy, what Mom may or may not have been exposed to, whether there was a traumatic event and if there was a family history of birth defects, the responses to which did nothing to explain my condition, they’d get around to considering what to do about it. The consensus among specialists was that I’d function better with a prosthetic arm and a mechanical hand—a hook. Before long, I was in the backseat of the family car, headed west on Interstate 69, bound for Grand Rapids and Mary Free Bed Hospital, Mom and Dad not too sure about it but earnestly honoring the opinions of the experts. I was five. I’d spend a month there, most of it by myself. I think it was harder on Mom than me. She cried most of the two-hour drive back to Flint. They’d come to visit on the weekends, but otherwise I’d trudge along with the program, which seemed to have as much to do with the doctors and nurses learning about me as it did with me learning to live with one good arm and one not-so-good arm.

  The experience was somewhat frightening. While the staff did wonderful work and was quite kind, for a five-year-old on his own the hospital was cold and sterile and not at all like my room and bed back in Flint. These beds had nets over them. I couldn’t decide whether they were there to keep me in or other people out. I spent a lot of time on that conundrum. I’d not considered myself before to be at any great disadvantage, since I managed to get most things done with some effort. Here, I saw children near my age with no legs, or no arms and no legs, or various combinations thereof. A decade had passed since doctors discovered the effects of thalidomide on women and their unborn children and withdrawn the drug, yet the consequences remained evident at Mary Free Bed. I was lonely and shy, but made a friend in a little girl with a big, friendly smile. She had remarkable spirit. At the hospital to master the daily tasks that everyone outside the hospital thought nothing of, that little girl had learned to open a tube of toothpaste, squeeze the toothpaste onto a toothbrush, and brush her teeth on her own. This was considered a great victory, and she happily shared it with visitors. She had no arms, but she had two legs and two feet, and she used those.

  While my friend the little girl learned the mechanics of dental hygiene, I was measured for a new right arm and educated in its many clunky benefits. It was bulky and heavy and had two steel pincers at the end, all of which was strapped to my tiny body by a harness. The clamps, operated by a cable, opened when the arm was extended and closed when the arm was drawn back. Despite the stump sock—they really called it that—even short periods wearing the artificial limb left my arm raw and sweaty and, right away, left me wondering if it was worth the effort. Even at five, going on six, I admired the kids in the hospital for their determination and encouraging outlook. They were nice to me. Their challenges were beyond anything I could have imagined. I wasn’t sure I belonged there with them. I mean, I was practically whole. My parents, it turned out, were sure I did not belong there.

  Unable to stay in Grand Rapids because of work, school, my baby brother, and the fact that they could not have afforded the hotel room, Mom and Dad visited on weekends. What they saw convinced them they’d made a mistake. There were children at Mary Free Bed—strong and brave children—who would always need the good people at Mary Free Bed. Their little Jimmy wasn’t one of them.

  One Saturday afternoon, a woman pushed her wheelchair-bound son into the hospital lobby. She was dressed in expensive furs. Jewelry shone from her ears, fingers, and wrists. An orderly approached from behind the reception desk. She gave the wheelchair one more gentle push and before it stopped rolling, she had pivoted on her high heels and was on her way back through the front doors. The aide caught the wheelchair on the glide. She had not said good-bye to the boy, had not given him one last hug, had not told him she loved him and would see him next weekend. She’d simply dropped him off, like he’d been a line on her to-do list. Deposit alimony check, get nails done, dump kid. Watching from a chair in the lobby, Dad was appalled. He filled out some paperwork and we walked out that same front door. On the drive back to Flint, me in the backseat again and ready to wield my unwieldy new arm, he spoke quietly with Mom. He’d had an epiphany, the kind that would carry him—and me—through much of my childhood, and help coax him out of his. The children we’d left behind, they’d need tending to, regular care, separate rules. The kid in the backseat, he’d be fine. Their heartfelt and perhaps desperate intentions—to have their child grow up with an honest shot at routine, at normalcy—hadn’t gone as planned. As Grand Rapids disappeared behind them, they couldn’t shake the suspicion they’d been swinging sledgehammers at butterflies, trying to solve the unsolvable.

  “We don’t have a problem,” he told Mom. “We’ve got a blip on the screen. We can handle this. We could make it a problem if we want it to be a problem. But, it’s no problem anymore.”

  I was just happy to be with Mom and Dad again, happy to feel the wind and hear the whistling through the crank-down windows, happy to have the hospital behind me, happy to have that smell out of my nose, happy to be going home. It was an important ride for all of us. We’d done our time on that side of the world, where the days were long and earnest, the people were committed to helping and healing, and tomorrow, frankly, would look a lot like today. I didn’t want to be poked and stretched and then sit around staring through the windows as nurses wrote notes on their clipboards. Nobody did, of course. Mom had known as much before she’d said good-bye a month before, when on her way home she’d sorted through conflicting ideas of protecting me and going along with the doctors, having left me to the white-coats. She cried because she’d miss her little boy and she cried because it seemed like overkill. She wished no one would have to be there, that no child would sleep under a netted bed, have to push around institutional food with institutional silverware, and wished the roof would blow off so the sun could come in. But, for the moment, her sadness was intended for one child only: hers.

  On that two-hour trip to Flint, we’d get our strength back. Mom and Dad felt hope, even optimism, for the first time beginning to focus not on what I lacked but what I had. The children who would stay behind—and many of them had arrived long before I had—were to Mom and Dad amazingly resilient. They’d show up in the therapy rooms in leg braces, or on crutches, or on legs in general appearance but not function, and take one more step than they had the day before, then burst into gritty smiles when the nurses cheered. There was more heroism in an afternoon at Mary Free Bed than there is in a decade of baseball games. Those kids figured it out, took a breath and, needing a mile, sweated through another inch.

  Mom was right. I didn’t belong. I was taking up space. I’d figure out my own way. As it happened, the chances for that came fast.

  It was one thing to strap into a prosthetic arm in a hospital room, sit with a therapist and, on the twenty-third try, grasp a now sca
rred wooden block from a desktop. It was quite another to pull that off in a kindergarten classroom with twenty-five other five-year-olds whirling about, all of them—it would seem—staring. I didn’t want to be that kid.

  On a morning in the fall of 1973, at nearly six years old, I would be that kid, officially. I rolled the stump sock up my right arm over my elbow and slid my old arm into my new arm. Mom cinched the harness over my shoulder and across my back. That summer I’d smashed bottles in the backyard, broken wooden planks in Uncle Mac’s basement, and boldly flipped steaks on the grill without a spatula, much to the uncomfortable amusement of our cookout guests, because my hook was, of course, one serious and indestructible weapon/utility tool and also a reasonable way to lift a wooden block. By the winter, with the release of a new television show, The Six Million Dollar Man, my hook would even have its cool moments. I’d slip away and become Col. Steve Austin, the bionic action hero, complete with rebuilt arm and covert missions that inevitably would end in the garage with me karate-chopping a Coke can I’d found under the workbench. I saved the world over and over, one Coke can at a time. On that morning of the first day of kindergarten, however, I wasn’t feeling so indestructible.

  I was feeling different and I hadn’t even left the house. For six years, I’d figured out enough things: I could work a fishing pole, though tying the barbed hook and then baiting it was out of my reach; I crushed a lot of worms. I could ride a bike just fine. I could punt a football a good ways. My dad had gone down to the drugstore and bought me a baseball glove, handing it over like it was a piece of crystal, and I’d found my way around that. The glove was a Dusty Baker model, tanned and leather and about as pliable as a new arithmetic textbook.

  School, however, seemed different. My curious head was excited. My plastic arm was on the sullen side. After I dressed in my new Toughskins jeans—straight out of the Sears catalog—and ironed shirt Mom had laid out, picked at breakfast, stood out in front of the house on Copeman Boulevard and got my first-day-of-school picture taken, and started the half-mile walk down Copeman, along Seneca Street, and up Mackin Road toward Anderson Elementary School, my arm became heavier and more obtrusive with every step. Mom, walking alongside, brightly pointed out my friends’ houses, the small rectangular structures with their aluminum awnings and neat lawns that sat just off the sidewalks along the way. She greeted the crossing guards on every corner and chatted reassuringly about the day that lay ahead.

  As we walked, and she talked, and kindergarten came to be only a block away, what I thought about was being that kid. I wished I could hide my fears like I always did, but Sears didn’t make pants with pockets deep enough for a store-bought arm. Maybe it wasn’t on the first day, but soon after I recalled a little girl crying at the sight of my prosthesis and its steel tongs, so sinister and threatening that Mrs. Mitchell told my parents she was worried about the other boys and girls in the class. She asked them to talk to me about being careful, so we had a serious conversation one night about that, how this thing that I hated wasn’t so popular with anyone else, either.

  The thing about a disability is, it’s forever. And forever might not end, but it has to start somewhere.

  For me, it began with the realization that I was different, except it did not arrive with a single unpleasant thunderclap. It arrived in nagging episodes over the course of every day, and what followed was the routine fight back from them, and the desire to be accepted.

  That’s how baseball—all sports, really—grew for me, from the Wiffle ball games in the backyard to the pretend games off the brick wall to the bike rides through the neighborhood and Little League games and then to the high school games.

  I wanted to play. I loved to play. But there was more. I sought acceptance beyond what my appearance told people about me. Their eyes, the way their voices softened, their subtle acts of protection, it was pity I didn’t want and couldn’t stand. Of the surviving qualities of Flint, parts of which were otherwise creeping toward ruin, there were plenty of games to play. By fifth grade I was being carpooled across town to play flag football on muddy fields lined by parents. The murmuring about that kid, the one people stared at, usually would start in the parking lot. Those doing the whispering must not have thought so, or didn’t care if I did, but I could always hear them. I could see them. They’d hold their conversations through our warm-ups, and then when I was the one playing quarterback, and then whenever the thought struck them. Even then I’d shut it out, or try, put my head down and play through the noise. Conflictingly, the games I loved brought me here, to these places that could be so uncomfortable in front of all these new people, and then they would make me the equal of their sons, or allow me the chance to be.

  In the years that followed, only the crowds changed. They got bigger and louder, but the reaction was always the same.

  There was a story about me in the local paper, The Flint Journal, in 1979. I was twelve. The headline was JIMMY ABBOTT: SPECIAL IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. The black-and-white photo showed me running off a dusty infield, wearing Toughskins, Jox sneakers, a mesh shirt bearing the name of a local real estate company—Grant Hamady—and an Anheuser-Busch cap, courtesy of my dad, now an Anheuser-Busch salesman and still complicated. My friends teased me for weeks after that, calling me “special” and all, but the short article and the photo that ran with it are still in a frame in Dad’s office, and Mom can still quote from the text.

  I had told the writer, Chuck Johnson, “I look at major leaguers and I wish it was me,” and the quote ran near the bottom of the story. My mom loved that sentiment, that I could have such an improbable dream. That I would dare to. It’s true, sports had a spiritual and therapeutic place in my life, functioning to comfort and strengthen me. And to distract me. I could always throw. I won the softball toss in third grade and, I won’t lie, that was a huge deal for me. In fact, I thought it was so important that I won first and second place. I’d left the prosthesis home that day.

  But, you know, there was no grand plan for sports to rescue me from a lifetime of bullies and insecurities. My father was a good high school athlete and still quite young, so naturally we’d wrestle around and we’d figure out a way to play catch and he’d talk about growing up playing stickball, so we’d try that, too. But, it was no different from the day he presented me with my first fishing rod with the Zebco reel, the kind where the whole thing would work with one hand and one thumb. And it was no different from working scissors for a class project. Or letting the line run free on a kite, then gathering it all back in. Or doing the dishes.

  Nobody pushed me to become an athlete—a ballplayer—because they hoped it would make me one of the guys, and certainly not because they believed I’d someday make a living doing it. I played sports because that’s what the boys in Flint did. When Sammie Phillips and Chris Cole were led by their moms down Copeman Boulevard, past the porches and the waving neighbors and our yellow Volkswagen station wagon, it was to play ball, some kind of ball. And when years later the older boys went hand-over-hand on a bat to see who could pick first, and they chose their teams, and I was the leftover kid standing there, I’d go home dispirited, only to have my dad tell me to get back out there and find a way into the game. So much of my childhood seemed to be spent riding my bike to the playground, my baseball glove looped through the handlebars, knowing I wasn’t going to be the first pick or even the last, but yearning for a way to prove myself.

  It seemed like a lot to hope for, but I had plenty of hope, and plenty of help.

  DONN CLARKSON WAS born not far from my neighborhood in 1925. The family doctor came to his parents’ house to deliver him, and when Donn resisted the doctor insisted, pulling him with forceps into the world and to his first breath. Donn used to say with a worn laugh that the doctor was in a hurry to get home for supper, because as it turned out those forceps crimped a nerve that led to Donn’s skull, so that he’d forever have limited use of the right side of his body. He walked with a limp. He grew up and went to work fo
r NASA as a Space Science Education Specialist, lecturing in schools, churches, and to service groups about the space program. Eventually, Donn—Mr. Clarkson, by then—became a teacher, my third grade teacher at Dye Elementary School, the kind who’d hand out cookies and posters of rocket ships and every Friday afternoon turn down the lights and show a movie. I’d sit next to Mr. Clarkson while he ran the films, close enough to the projector so I could feel its heat against my face.

  Mr. Clarkson knew what it meant to stand out in a room of kids. So, him with his limp and me with my arm, we shared a bond we almost never talked about. When he was young, he’d been told he’d probably never ride a bike and certainly never drive a car. He spent half his childhood on a bike. By the time he retired from NASA, having spoken to small gatherings in small towns all over the Midwest and beyond, he’d driven maybe two million miles, then became a licensed pilot and flew at least that far. I knew none of that. His wife, Jean, was a local occupational therapist for forty-four years, twenty-five of them working with handicapped children at another elementary school in Flint. They spoke often of me and my challenges. I knew none of that.

  What I knew was when a girl in class looked me dead in the eye and told me she didn’t like my hand, I ran near tears to Mr. Clarkson, whose advice was, “Next time you tell her you don’t like her face, because she can’t change her face any more than you can change your hand.” Different era, you know.

  And what I knew was that Mr. Clarkson had an eye for detail, for the sorts of things that might not be bothersome for most, but perhaps would have been for him, and therefore might be for me. Every morning before school I’d stand mostly still while my sneakers were tied, this being one of those learned skills that, at eight, I hadn’t quite gotten around to yet. Mom or Dad would double-knot, triple-knot those Keds so they’d be all but soldered on. I really hadn’t thought much about it, but Mr. Clarkson greeted me one morning with a great smile and a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I figured it out!” And I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about. “I know how you can tie your shoes,” he said, and I looked down at the tangled messes of laces piled atop my shoes and thought, This could take a while. Seems Mom had mentioned something to Mr. Clarkson about the daily shoe-tying experience, and he had gone home and worked on a strategy that night. The following morning he turned on the projector, occupying the rest of the class, and dragged two chairs into the hallway. Through open classroom doors, other kids in other classes watched what surely must have been some disciplinary drama going down.