The ugliest girl in my Harbor Elementary School in Baldwin, NY was a girl named Ginny. I remember this story like it was yesterday…
It was one of the first beautiful Spring days in early May, 1975. I ate (inhaled) lunch with the friends in my 3rd grade class and shot out to the schoolyard to play. It was also the day my Mother was picked to be the Volunteer Mom. By maternal duty standards, it was a pretty simple task I guess. The mom-d’jour would be given a whistle and asked to watch over 400 or so screaming lunatics at play. If a fight broke out, a baseball card throw-up© got out of hand or someone got trampled playing Rumble©, the Schoolyard Mom would intercede.
Little did I know my mother was keeping one eye on the crowd and the other on her mischievious son. I don’t recall if she was using her super perceptive senses or had secretly sewn a bugging device into my fruit of the looms, but at a distance of at least 100 yards, she caught me teasing, taunting and basically trying to make life a living hell for an older girl named Ginny - a kid who had been given the nickname Frankenstein.
Without knowing what had happened to me, I was literally yanked from the playground by me left ear and read the riot act.
“How dare you!” she said. “I thought I raised you better than that.”
“But Mom,” I argued, “She is ugly - With that freaky, buck-toothed face and those stupid metal things on her legs.”
“Well young man, I guess when your punishment starts today, you’ll soon see those braces on her legs are there for a reason,” she said - with an obvious look of pain and disappointment in her face.
“Punishment?” I asked. “For what? Everyone calls her Frankenstein.”
Needless to say, I lost that argument. At 3:05 that afternoon my rather unique punishment commenced. I was to read a chapter a day from a book entitled “Ginny: A True Story.” Even though I didn’t understand the big words on the jacket, it appeared to be written from a lady in our town of Baldwin, A Mrs. Carson.
I came to learn Ginny was a very special - and by some standards; rather fortunate. A few years earlier, just prior to my family moving into town from the city, Ginny Carson was, by all accounts, a very friendly, playful, caring and beautiful little girl. She, like myself, even liked to play kickball. A the tender age of 6, she was stuck down by a car on Grand Ave and left permanently disfigured, mentally handicapped and crippled.
It was somewhere around the middle of the book, at around chapter 7 or 8, I came to realize I’d never, ever tease someone because they looked or acted ‘differently’. Even though I was too young to comprehend every word I was reading, her family’s anguish & her pain came through as clear a crystal. I thought back to all the times she was teased and taunted and how she never stopped smiling and I realized how beautiful she was.
I don’t know what ever happened to Ginny, but thoughts of her and her ceaseless smile still brings a tear to my eye. She was beautiful and her experiences taught me how precious life truly is.
