Out Of Reach

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?”

Robert Browning

One cold, long-ago January morning, so much like the ones we’ve been enjoying these last few weeks, I was on my way into our church’s classroom building, when the children caught my eye.

Some 100 feet away, across the half-dead grass of the churchyard, on the far side of a chain link fence, the daycare boys and girls were enjoying their recess. Two or three seemed especially enraptured by a crumpled piece of colored paper, tangled in the grass on my side of the fence.

Pressing the soft bulbs of their cheeks against the metal, they threaded their thin little arms through various slots between the links – groping and grabbing for that elusive wad of paper.

A breeze came up. The wad of paper rocked lazily on its tuft of grass, just out of reach of the small, straining fingers. One by one, the children gave up the effort … running off in search of swings or bugs or other fascinating pieces of a world still wonderfully wide and new.

All but one. He kept at it, straining for the paper, his tight red face a ferocious grimace of concentration – reaching, reaching for that bright, crumpled bit of color.

He finally fell back, out of breath, and looked up to see me, watching. I waved. A grin crept over his face. He waved back. Then he clambered up and leaned hard through the fence again, his little fingers stretching for all they were worth. I turned and went inside.

A few hours later, I heard about Eric Taylor.

Two years earlier, Eric had been a student in my English and journalism classes. Six-foot-seven, a new Christian out of Camden, New Jersey, he wrote for the student newspaper, and played forward on the basketball team, the year our university won the national championship.

What I always remember were his legs. Long, ridiculously skinny legs, made longer and skinnier by the knee-length basketball shorts then in fashion. To this day, I close my eyes and it’s those legs I see, stiff and straight as toothpicks, lifting up and down as he blocked an opponent … jerking awkwardly as he twisted and grasped for a ball beneath the basket, or launched himself into the air for another rebound … stretching like his life depended on it.

He’d pant up and down the court, almost on tiptoe, the sweat cascading off him, the toothpicks pounding down and back and down again – mighty leaps, frantic reaches. And always, that look of almost comical intensity, the ferocious grimace of concentration as he followed the ball.

It was the same scowl he wore in my 7:40 a.m. English class, grappling with characters and themes and sentence diagrams. The finer points mostly eluded him, and some of the rougher ones left him dazed and bemused. But his determination was an unstoppable force – and a pleasant surprise for a teacher who more frequently encountered immovable objects: inertia, apathy, the lazy slide-by.

Grammar and composition never came easily for him, but he kept trying. He got better. Spelling plagued him. On newspaper assignments, he found it hard to juggle all five W’s. He fumed and frowned, erased and revised and asked his questions again and again.

I encouraged him. He grunted. I teased him. He grinned. He worked hard, grew flustered, gave up, went back to it. He seemed to put as much of his back as his brain into most assignments, and took home respectable grades only half as good as classmates giving one-third the effort.

Came the day he turned in the last final, shook my hand, and bobbed away on those toothpicks. I watched him, following the bouncing balls of his feet, those skinny legs scissoring the air.

A few weeks later, up on stage, he reached out for his diploma, grasped the president’s outstretched hand, and waved his hard-earned sheepskin in defiant pride overhead, the magnificent grimace breaking into a huge, triumphant smile.

The long, long legs, half-hidden by robes of honor, flapped past the row where I sat, smiling and clapping and yelling with the rest.

It was most of two years before I saw him again, one wintry night on the evening news, in grainy two-in-the-morning footage taped on a westside street a few hours before … the skinny legs half-hidden by the white sheet draped across his body.

He was bobbing toward the police, pointing the gun in his hand, that terrible scowl smoldering on his face, when the bullets brought him down.

They said he’d had marital problems. Was under a lot of stress. Just went berserk.

I looked at those long black toothpicks, sticking out from under a sheet, and thought of the bounce in that walk as he stepped out on the basketball court … that ferocious concentration as he scrawled careful words on paper. The shy, beaming smile, as he walked down off that stage.

His mind, grasping. His heart, groping. His hand, reaching, reaching.

Like his life depended on it.