A Lesson

I've been thinking a lot lately about a guy named "Carlton" and how much I learned from him. An unlikely teacher, he was one of the people in our neighborhood when we lived on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. We saw him almost every day - when he picked up his mail, or waited to see the nurse at the clinic, or hitched a ride into town, or walked past our house on the way down to his.

Now, Carlton had something terrible wrong with him. There was no debate about that. One theory was that his brains were fried by illegal drugs, especially "weed." He was normal at one time and even sang bass in the church choir, his former high school teacher told me. Another theory was that he suffered from schizophrenia, a more likely diagnosis. One day he'd sit on the ground and loudly curse the government. On another day, he'd carry a briefcase and say he was advising the government on this or that project. How he acted from day to day was unpredictable.

After Hurricane Hugo decimated the island, the government gave storm victims small pre-fab houses, usually two rooms plus a tiny kitchen, to replace what they had lost. Carlton, who was about 25 when we first met him, was a recipient, but his Hugo House was put together in the busy and often noisy area near where his mother lived. Carlton didn't like the Hugo House and rarely slept there. Instead, he preferred the ruins of a house in an uninhabited area close to the sea.

Hugo House

There were no in-patient mental health services on the island, and hardly any out-patient treatment except for the shots provided at the clinic just up the hill from our house. I guess he got a shot of some kind once in a while, but I didn't know the particulars and didn't want to pry.

We all just did the best we could with however Carlton presented himself on a given day. When his feet were sore from wearing beat-up men's dress shoes without socks, one neighbor bought him a pair of sneakers. Another neighbor always had a can of tuna or sardines on hand to feed Carlton when his disability check didn't stretch far enough. Papayas, coconuts and grapefruit, some from our yards and some growing wild, rounded out his diet.

When he wanted a ride into town, usually with briefcase in hand and wearing his best clothes, one of the neighbors would always oblige, despite what we all knew about his behavior of yesterday or last week. He could carry on a conversation, sometimes lucid, sometimes not. And we talked. Despite his affliction, whatever it was, we all tried to treat him like a normal man.

He was one of us, after all.