I was 4 years-old in the summer of 1969 when I landed in the hospital after falling six feet from the top of the slide at our local playground. I escaped significant injury, but was kept for a long weekend of tests and evaluations.
There were five or six children to a room on the pediatrics ward, and the beds were arranged against the wall around the perimeter.
On the second day, shortly after visiting hours, a new boy was brought in and placed in the bed across from me. My parents had just exited the room and I was feeling terribly lonely when I looked over at my new roommate. He was smiling warmly through the protective bars that surrounded his bed. His skin was the color of chocolate ice cream, and his hair, also dark, was short and kinky. I was curious about the way he looked, but I hadn’t yet developed a definitive sense of my own physical appearance, so I saw him as another sick child and a potential ally.
His name was Christopher and we played together whenever we were allowed out of our beds. We shared each other’s food at lunchtime even though we were advised not to. We must have presented quite a contrast, me with my fair skin and towhead-blonde hair, and him my physical opposite. We didn’t know that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been killed the year before or what their deaths signified. We hadn’t yet heard of Vietnam or civil rights. He was the first black person I ever met and since we had not been preconditioned to behave any other way, we became friends.
On Monday, I was discharged and happy to leave. I missed Christopher at first, but I was a young boy and easily distracted, so after a while I didn’t think much about my comrade from the hospital. I never saw him again, but I haven’t forgotten.
Looking back, I know that my friendship with Christopher was formed over three days in a fish bowl. No one came into that hospital room and whispered to either of us that maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much time together. We weren’t tested by society or peer pressure. I’m glad it didn’t come to that, I love the memory just the way it is. It remains beautiful in that it stands as an example of my once limitless potential and tolerance, and, I think, the potential and tolerance of all children. We hadn’t yet been poisoned by the opinions, experiences, and prejudices in the world. Just two children making the best of a difficult situation. It is one of the few memories I have of my own pureness and innocense, and I pray that as I get older time does not rob me of it.
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