The Benjamin Report

“Defensive” as a term for Children

Going back almost two decades, if you traveled to Belle Reynolds Elementary School you’d find a magical empire in its backyard. It’s still there if you look hard enough, past a grassy ditch within that mass of cracked concrete, there are the artifacts and traces of a once proud kingdom of childlike wonder and escape. I lived there.

Fossils of my skin tissue, scraped out of me and into the blacktop remain among the dead bugs and compacted dust. Seeped into that large, worn-down brick of a lost city you’ll find my blood, spit, and earwax. Mine, my friends, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of kids that called Oakfield home.

Now, it’s there but unused and stuck in a village with one foot sinking away in the quicksand of decline while the other is using all its force to yank it out, reaching above and forward into some wild unknown labeled modernization. And then there is the school, Belle Reynolds, sold somewhere in the era of 2009 for $50,000.

I no longer reside in Oakfield, I turned in my citizenship of that forgotten kingdom for a chance at adulthood in Milwaukee. Today, my weeks and months pass by quicker than back in my adolescent heyday, anchored by property rent anxieties and career uncertainties. Perhaps I wouldn’t have even remembered that little wonder if it weren’t for a taken opportunity that placed me in an elementary school earlier this year.

Starting in the first week of January in 2024, I volunteered on weekdays as a tutor at a small public elementary school. The homely building looked from the outside like a warehouse repurposed for the education of children. Inside wasn’t much different, with walls an ugly hue of yellow and old pockmarked tiling, a display of disregard reminiscent of a hack-job Troma film from the 80s.

I hadn’t worked with children at any point in my life. At this point I was a coffee shop worker just a few years removed from graduating from a local university with a degree in the Arts. I didn’t know what to expect, nor if I’d even be up for this challenge, in my head I was still lost in the weeds. All of those nerves and disappointments are what led me here, into a point in my life where I needed to find something, anything as long as it’s not the same dirge I’ve dedicated myself to this past decade.

Sometimes when you edit a movie, you find yourself in the position where you have hours of footage and you love every second of it. You have this massive thing, but it needs to be puzzled into ninety minutes. So you chop it apart. Hours of images and character torn to bits, either removed from the project or compressed into minutes of dramatized fiction. What you get is not what happened, not what moved you yourself into that fantasy, that brilliance that you wanted to share. Here, I’m an editor and I’m cutting my film.

We cut from scenes of my youth at Belle Reynolds: montages of exploring the woods near the Ledge, syrup straight from the tap poured over ice cream, classroom walls on wheels, and communal sinks to wash our hands. Through spit and stagger, eating boogers and chucking rocks at bullies, defending snow forts from invaders across the blacktop, and earning ourselves pretend purple hearts we fired away at the seams that struggled to hold us together. Here we have ourselves a full sequence of at least one of those parades with kids tossing candy at the village residents, begging them to vote YES on a piece of paper to decide our fate in Oakfield.

We were swirled in the local political scene by grownups focused on the penny pinching and economics of running a school district in a village of 700. I had stickers and handouts. Vote YES, I want to stay because I love my village and I love my school. Vote YES, please spare that little money to keep our teachers busy, to keep me on the blacktop kingdom defending my honor and the honor of my fellow schoolmates. This is my place, please don’t let it go.

Hard, smash cut, maybe a match with me at age 9 holding a pencil like a sword drawn for combat. Take that and put me together with little Martin, a seven year old black kid in Milwaukee doing the same thing because he still has that wonder. Now, reverse shot, I’m looking back at him. There’s exhaustion in my face, having been awake since 4am doing my first job then sprinting over to do my second, but there’s a smile. It’s a genuine smile because I said the word “Hell” forgetting that it was a naughty cuss. And little Martin is ready to exemplify the capital punishment that was due for such a crime.

In Oakfield, I was a kid and didn’t know what “referendum” meant. I didn’t know that a few checks on a piece of paper going the other direction could’ve changed my life multiple times over. Martin doesn’t know that either, neither Sam, nor Benji, nor Isla. They don’t because they’re kids and Martin is still struggling with spelling “cannot.” They have more important things to do than paperwork, they have adventures yet to be recorded and secret missions to be taken. These little kids do not know that the world around them is sinking, all they know is each other and how best to make the kid next to them either laugh or cry.

In my little smile back at Martin, I’m thinking that too. This executioner with his hand on the blade, perhaps if I could just get a laugh out of him I could expect a pardon. Perhaps even an award in the form of finally saying “cannot” on the first try.

On April 2nd, the grownups of Milwaukee have a choice, it is on a piece of paper and it requires a mark. Isla, the other day, finished her lesson way ahead of time so we proceeded into an unknown territory. She wanted to learn more, so I offered her tips and taught her difficult words that she wasn’t expected to learn yet. One of those words was “Defensive.” She was able to spell it out, and was excited when she got it right. “But what does it mean?” she asked me.

“Defensive is like a military tactic, when you attack me, I go on the defensive. Go ahead, try and punch me.” As she punches I pull up my arms, blocking each hit. “That’s it, I’m on the defensive. You’ll probably learn it for real in like ten years.”

“Ten years! That’s forever.”

Unfortunately, this will be it for this episode. Usually there would be a lot more writing. But this time, I feel like leaving it at that. Thank you for reading.

See you next week 🙂