Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers was tall. 

He stood at the back of the class photos, looking at the camera and he never smiled.  He didn’t need to.  Something in him always smiled. 

He moved slowly and delicately, sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t moving at all.  In the classroom he sat behind everyone else, his knees knocking the top of his wooden desk.  He looked out the window when the teacher spoke, one ear listening to the convention of birds in the tree tops, the other to Miss McFuller.

She was an exasperated woman but Richard Rogers took her to the edge.  It didn’t matter how much little attention he paid, if she asked him a question, he answered correctly.  Which way does the moon swing, do zucchinis have to be green, are peas from or pod or a nod, should grass be cut in winter or summer, what is an hypotenuse, what did Darwin teach us, what did Einstein discover. 

She spluttered at his answers.

The moon, Miss McFuller, swung to the right during the week and to the left on the weekends.  Zucchinis were white before green.  Grass needs to be cut in summer.  The hypotenuse was the longest length of a right-angled triangle.  Darwin taught evolution and Einstein gave us the theory of relativity.  Miss.

If she sighed and told him to look at her, not out the window, he would look directly at her, his brown eyes gentle and enquiring. 

“Sorry, Ma’am.”

She would blush and look away, as if he had touched her intimately. 

But Richard Rogers was like that.  He could squat down low for a card game, put down a five dollar note, watch the game animatedly and then poof, he’d be pointing to the tip of a crow’s wings, measuring its span, commenting on its blackness. 

“Beauty everywhere,” he mumbled to me one day.

“What?” I said, rushing to get to class. 

The bell had already rung.  Richard Rogers never ran for the bell.  It wouldn’t get him anywhere faster he said.

“Beauty,” he spoke more loudly and a few teachers turned.  He made a squiggle in the air with his hand, drawing the shape of a flower.

“Everywhere,” he shouted. 

He loped a long, unaware of those who smiled around him or how his squiggle was at this very moment, lodging deep in their hearts.  

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