Truth or Consequences

So two visits to David later, I'm back here. The first week in May was a wonderful time to drive through the mountains and valleys and along the rivers and also a wonderful time to reconnect with my son in a way that letters just can't accomplish. At that time he was winding up a series of Hepatitis C treatments but looked very well to me. I do think, and this was borne out by last week's visit too, that his capacity to consume junk food is less. And I was totally amazed that he actually requested a vending machine salad both last time and this.

In between visits David has turned forty. My baby, my youngest child and my only son, is forty. This time we talked some about what was going on in the world in 1968, and I shared with him a little about what I remember about that year. Of course I was pregnant for part of it, but he was born in May, after the murder of Martin Luther King and before the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, both shocking events but especally shocking to a person lke myself who admired those men a lot. There has been quite a bit of public discussion about that year, and most people who were old enough to remember it, do remember it.

1968 was smack dab in the middle of one of the favorite periods of my life. Yes, I was busy, maybe too busy, but it was a good busy and a fearless busy. Although the world and the country were in the midst of turmoil, I never thought that anything bad could really happen to anyone I knew. I was twenty-eight, a mother of four already. I lived where I wanted to live in a house I had visited on my own childhood Hallowe'en nights, one block away from where I had grown up. My children were beautiful, my then husband and I were healthy, our marriage was about what I expected. I had no clue.

Forty years later I am still probably clueless in some ways, but I have lost the ability to trust very deeply. Losses and thefts over the years have taken from me the confidence in my own ability to judge people and situations. That's not just about David. He is only one among many people who have not always deserved my trust. That simple fact is, I think, one of the things that connects me to others in my and similar situations, doing time with a loved one. We hope our current trust is not misplaced, no matter how limited it might be. Personally, I feel reasonably confident that when David tells me something, even something trivial, it's the truth. I know he is motivated to live with rigorous honesty by his own spiritual health. He has come to understand that piling up deceptions just walls one in, sometimes in a place that is hellish.

One other prisoner that David and I often see in the Visiting Room is about as prolific a liar as I have ever seen. I first noticed this young man about two years ago, and he was explaining to his parents about the privileges he had earned: among other things, a plum job and a bunk where there was a 24-hour cereal bar. Really. Few people could make that up, but given prison budgets, it takes more naivete than even I have to believe the part about the cereal bar. In my state of South Carolina, it was recently reported that the daily food allowance for each prisoner is $1.43. That's about the lowest in the nation, but Ohio's budget issues are not different enough ever to have permitted round-the-clock buffets of any kind.

Since I first noticed the "cereal bar liar," I've paid attention to the body language of his parents, and last month I thought to myself, "Even his Dad can't take it any more" as the man got up and took a walk in the aisle. Last week I noticed that his mother had her arms folded across her chest for the entire three hours of the visit. But these people love their son, whoever he really is and whomever he presents himself to be, and they visit faithfully. My prayers are with them and with all those who are doing time, inside the bars or outside.