2021.03.28 A Palm For Phineas

The sanctuary’s emptiness after Palm Sunday made it feel even more hallowed than when it was filled with exuberant Hosannas, calling out: Lord, Save. Save! Or bloated hallelujahs—leftover echoes of Easters spent.    

I felt spent too. I sat alone in the pew of a tiny suburbanish church, its steeple piercing the blue sky, humming the “hymn” of the 1950s, “What’s it All About Alfie?”  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something green poking out from under a front pew. I stooped and discovered a leftover palm—already aging and beginning to brown and die. This palm’s still-sharp point stuck stubbornly into the aisle. Inexplicably, I thought of Phineas.
            
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I have to tell this story over and over, because it continues to break my heart. I was fourteen and had moved with my family from NYC to lower Fairfield County, Connecticut. I’d left my private all-girls’ school and entered a foreign land called public school.

Phineas was like a perfect storm—everything converging to create his daily trauma. His name may once have enjoyed noble status, but did not in a roiling American junior high school in 1952. Phineas had thick glasses, was overweight, duck-footed and lumbering, his face pocked with teenage acne, and he was carrying the violin he played. Put those ingredients all together, add a hostile bus driver, and you see Phineas in teenage terrorist camp, by which I mean the daily school bus torture rituals arranged by testosterone-challenged seventh grade boys. Being white was Phineas’s only hope to fit in. But everyone else was white too, so it was no advantage.

Every single day Phineas would slowly climb onto the bus. Every single day the boys would call to him to come to the back of the bus to sit with them. Their cooing was not friendly. Girls tended to sit in the front of the bus. Yet, how could Phineas sit with the girls and risk more dire consequences?  It would have turned his perfect storm into a hurricane. So he lugged his violin to the rear of the bus.

They pushed him to the floor; they grabbed his hat; they spat on him; they opened his violin case and tried to play on it while singing dumb songs; he cried.  And every single day Phineas would miss his stop and have to walk back to get home. Every single day.

God knows what awaited him at home. Love, I hope. But if I were his parent I’d drive him to school and pick him up. Still, he might not have told his parents about his daily humiliation. The only adult, not a grown-up, on that bus was Mr. Fitz whose paunch looked ample enough to steer the vehicle, no hands. Mr. Fitz laughed and scoffed and never intervened to save Phineas—not once.

To witness such suffering and feel helpless is a trauma as vivid to me now as it was seventy-one years ago. My choices seemed almost as paralyzing as Phineas’s must have felt to him. I could fight, flee, or freeze. I was too scared to fight so I froze in my seat, wishing and wishing, fervently as a prayer, that Phineas would fight.  

I chose escape. I made my mother drive me to school. Knowing she’d remember my carsickness, I told her I now had bus-sickness. I did, but it wasn’t motion sickness; it was compassion nausea. I didn’t tell the truth, nor befriend Phineas. I feared repercussions. I too had to survive this cruel culture and endure the contagion of shame.

By senior high school my own hormonal rage kicked in. I had learned to flirt. I’d developed breasts that would pop up enough to look perky in a tight sweater atop a pencil skirt in which I minced along, hoping to look sexy. My flirting had a specific goal—revenge. My “victim” was one of those bus bullies. I wanted to hurt him for Phineas’s sake—and for mine. He asked me out. I flirted mercilessly and secured his trust enough that he confided in me that his father hit him. He laughed about it. I felt sick inside—compassion laced with fear. What if he hit me?

I was almost seventeen years old when I understood that bullying was total avoidance of vulnerability, mostly because someone had bullied you first and you had to make sure it never happened again. This boy, my date, had turned into a macho hot shot, full of bravado and just as scared inside as Phineas, and me.

After high school I never saw Phineas again, but I never forgot him. I never knew him, except by heart. When Google-God came into being decades later, I searched for Phineas but found no data that fit my Phineas. It’s funny, but I count him as one of the inspirations that called me into ordained ministry to follow the ministry of compassion and healing through forgiveness and absolution—of my soul for having been a silent complicit bully myself.   

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Sitting in the pew fingering the palm’s green tip, I said one small hosanna/alleluia for Phineas. He’d be in his sixties now. I hoped he was still alive and a concert master violinist in some major symphony orchestra where huge crowds applauded, gave standing ovations, and never hissed or spat.