Rita's Bench

We stepped into the bright sunshine of an early September afternoon. My daughter was just given a clean bill of health at her thirty-six month doctor’s check-up and the sting of her COVID shot was tempered by three stickers of cartoon heroes. As we walked along the concrete sidewalk she chatted away incessantly about the needle and the “doctor not listen me”. I was about to engage her in conversation when my eye was drawn to a granite memorial bench with the name Rita Bagley 1965-2020, and it struck me that I knew a girl named Rita Bagley when I was growing up and the dates would be right. She died at fifty-five and now she has a bench.

My friend Gordon had once told me that when he died, he didn’t want a grave he wanted a bench someplace near the ocean so that people would see his name and maybe they would think of him when they looked over the ocean view and at least he would still be able to get a woman to sit on his lap.

“A bench is better than a headstone” he would say “people spend big money on headstones that no one enjoys visiting and it’s never happy when they do. Do you think that a widow brings her new husband to the stone and says, ‘Hey Hon, this is Roger, I know you’ll love him, he’s enjoying your recliner and sleeping on your old side of the bed now’? No, they just stop coming because they move on and then the closest you get to visitors is some teenage goofball weed-whacking the hell out of your absurdly expensive stone for a summer work gig. But a bench, strategically located will get you traffic for years and years. Plus, you don’t have to pay for a burial plot. In a cemetery, have to pay top dollar and you could be buried next to some loser or even worse, you’re buried next to a local hero and then you’d be the loser buried next to them. No Sir, the bench is the way to go”.     

This was Rita’s bench.

She was a girl with special needs who grew up in a time when those children literally rode the “short bus”. I’m not sure if it was a cruel joke or a mercy to allow them peace from torment on the regular bus. God knows the trip to school was hard enough for smaller, nerdier or scared kids. They’d be the target of bullies or japes by the “cool” kids, and a person with special needs would be subjected to torments and probably never get that they were the butt the joke. The short bus drew attention to kids that were different by placing them on a bus that was different.

What I remembered most about Rita was her kind smile. She always smiled and it was a big toothy smile. She had curly blonde hair, with big blue eyes and wire rimmed glasses. She had what people might describe as a “moon face” which is common with long-term use of some medications. In many ways she looked like a five-foot, ten-inch version of Charlie Brown’s sister Sally, even down to her hairstyle.

Because she was part of the Special Ed program, we never saw her in classes. She and a handful of other kids were whisked away to a classroom in the basement of the school. We’d see the “SpEd kids” as they were known amongst the other students, in the auditorium where everyone gathered in the cliques to catch up on what was happening. In 1983, there was no internet, and the auditorium was the equivalent of Facebook where everyone could come and lie about how awesome their life was.   

Every group had a clique, jocks, jerks, popular, unpopular, nerds, burn-outs and even the SpEd kids. There was safety in being part of a group, like the herds of different species of animals on the Serengeti standing together hoping to avoid a Lion attack. Together they were less likely to be prey, but to straggle off may mean humiliation by some bully whose pinnacle of existence would be scoring a in a big game which made them a ‘somebody’. Because after that they would never achieve the notoriety or adoration they had in high school, and they would become a ‘nobody’ again.

It was a morning like any other morning when Rita straggled off away from her herd oblivious to the perils that lurked in the packs of Jackals that prowled the auditorium. As she walked through the crowd with her smile as big as ever, she was spotted by a collection of fake tough guys in denim Levi jackets which was the 80’s equivalent of the leather jacket from the 50’s. Their leader was a tall pimple faced troll of a boy named Butch Kenney. His real name was Carroll Kenney, but he was teased for having a girl’s name for much of his childhood and chose Butch as a way to “toughen” it up. He had stringy, greasy long red hair and a set of teeth that were too big for his mouth, so in that way he looked very similar to Beavis from the MTV cartoons. He was bigger and tougher than most of the kids in the school and thus became the leader of the Jackals and was always surrounded by lesser toadies pretending to be jackals as well.

Butch approached her with a big smile and asked her about Hersey Bars. Rita lit up and started to sing the jingle from a television commercial at the time. “No, no don’t sing here,” he pointed to the stage at the front of the auditorium “up there, loud so we can all hear how good you sing”.

Rita smiled and strode to the stage. No one paid her much attention because we were all busy with our own crisis’s du jour and worrying about who might be looking if we did something odd or might be listening if we disclosed some secret. It was room of two hundred or so egocentric teens living in our own drama filled personal hells.

The usual din of teenage chatter was broken by Rita’s singing. It was a 1980’s TV jingle for a chocolate bar.  

“Hersey’s is… real milk chocolate I love that Heresy’s bar!” Rita stepped her right foot out and threw her arms out like she was reaching for someone and stepped back to the middle. “Hersey’s is…that something special no matter where you are!” she performed the same move now to the left and stepped back again and started marching in place.

“Anytime you want delicious chocolate, there’s no need to go looking very far! ...cause Hersey’s is that great American… great American… chocolate bar!” and she dropped to one knee with her hands thrown in the air like some cliché vaudeville actress. The auditorium erupted in laughter and clapping and whistles and cheers. She sang like she had practiced it a thousand times in front of her own TV whenever that commercial came on. It wasn’t unlike my own daughter trying to act out the Wizard of Oz songs with an Elmer Fudd like toddler speech.

The “faculty” in charge of the auditorium was a morbidly obese buffoon named Mike. I guess that I forgot his last name and maybe because of this incident. He stood there frozen not acting while the auditorium degenerated into a vile mockery. I have to admit that I was horrified for her, but I didn’t act either. I was afraid of being mocked or bullied so I stood still, making me no better than Mike what’s his name, I knew the right thing to do, but I didn’t do it.

It was a cheerleader of all people. A very popular girl named Anna who calmly walked to the stage and smiled at Rita “that was great, but why don’t you come with me now” and they walked down the stairs and the show was over. There was booing that the show ended, but Anna didn’t react to it, instead she told Rita how well she had sung. Amazingly in her adult life, Anna had a child with special needs herself and had become a great advocate for that population.

The kids in the special education room had many of the same issues as all teenagers. Rita had become the love interest of two boys in her class. I suppose that since she was one of the only girls in the group, she was bound to get attention from them. Alan and Chuck spent all day, every day at school in her presence and at some point, Alan got up the nerve to ask her to be his girlfriend. They held hands and that was probably the extent of their intimacy since they never saw each other outside of school. At some point during senior year, Chuck decided that he wanted to be her boyfriend and asked her to be his girlfriend to which she agreed and stopped holding hands with Alan in favor of Chuck.

There was never any confrontation that anyone was made aware of, but Alan would move to groups he felt safe around and complain that Chuck had stolen his girlfriend. This went on for the rest of the school year. In fact, at the 10-year class reunion, Alan showed up (Rita and Chuck did not) and he proceeded to talk about how he was still upset and that it wasn’t right that Chuck had stolen Rita from him.

That was the last day that I had heard anything about Rita until I saw her bench. I reached out to see what had happened to her through social media. It turns out that both of her parents were significantly older most parents when she was born and had now both passed away. Rita lived in a group home and had a normal routine of a volunteer job at the hospital delivering newspapers to patient rooms and otherwise doing things that everyone else does like going shopping and to the movies, with the help of twenty-four-hour staffing.

At the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, she was still allowed to deliver the newspapers and eventually did so with a mask on. Somewhere between volunteering or the community she contracted COVID. She was hospitalized where she volunteered and was the third death of many to occur in that hospital. The staff collected money and had the bench placed in her memory since she had no other immediate relatives still living.

The bench made me grateful for the health of all of my children, but most of all made me remember a perfectly kind soul who otherwise might have been forgotten.