In the mid-1980s, I lived in Seattle, Washington. While I was out there, I volunteered to lead a short story reading and discussion group for inmates in a state prison. I remember hearing slam after slam of concrete and/or metal doors before I got to the room where the program was held.
I tried to select short stories that would stimulate discussion not only about the story itself, but about life. One of the prisoners stood out to me when we discussed the stories, because he seemed to have taken such a deep dive into trying to change. I don’t mean to say he had a “hey, look at me,” pontificating way about him. He just had a soft-spoken and what felt to me to to be very genuine determination to discern and adhere to what I’ll call “principles of right living.”
One day after the program, I got into a one-on-one conversation with him, and we got around to the subject of the change in his thinking and resultant actions since he’d been incarcerated. I felt optimistic about where his life was heading and about his chances of making it on the outside, so I asked him when he was getting out.
He said, “I’m not. I’m doing natural life.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “natural life”, it means, as opposed to some life sentences, there is no possibility of parole. You can do your time well, badly, or indifferently, but, to borrow from Bob Dylan, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.
I reflexively winced at the prospect of never being able to leave that grim space, and he picked up on my doing so. He said, “Yeah, the guys in here ask me how come I’m so into being a better person if I’m never getting out. I tell them, ‘Hey, I got a life. It’s here.’” Then he looked down and pointed to the concrete floor.
I didn’t ask him about his crime, because I figured it was up to him to talk about such things. And he didn’t ask me to do anything special for him.
He was about my age, maybe younger. If, like me, he’s still alive, then I can assume he’s never left that place that I could come and go from freely as a volunteer. I did the math as to how many minutes have passed since he and I had that conversation. The number is about 19 million.
While I’ve spent those 19 million minutes partaking in a movable feast of different people and different settings and different happenings, he’s watched a generation of prison workers walk out the gates for the last time into retirement, and a generation of prisoners be released.
There are things a person can do to write a different ending to their life story than the one for which they once seemed headed, but erasing the earlier chapters is not one of them. You can learn from your past, use your past to help others, be accountable and responsible for your past (sometimes society steps in to ensure that), repair what you can of the damage you have done, do the best you can with what you’ve got left, and try to live in a way up to 180 degrees differently, but you can’t make the past not exist.
He had a more stark reminder of that fact every day than most of us.
If that young man is an old man in prison today, my hope is he woke up this morning with the same resolve to reach through the bars toward the light that I felt in him those many years ago. And if he died during one of those 19 million minutes, and perhaps was buried in some potter’s field for lifers, then this column has given you an outline of a later chapter of his story, in case you were interested.
Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.
