Remember Walter

Would you like to live forever? Maybe it seems impossible, but some people do. At least in our memories. Their bodies may be gone, but their souls keep going. Socrates, Jesus, George Washington, and, of course, St Patrick are but a few who continue to touch all our lives and live on in our memories. Just run the snakes out of Ireland, and you are guaranteed green colored immortality and being remembered each spring forever. Then there are the lives that are less known to the many, but still so close to the few.

My much loved grandparents are long gone, but I cannot open my washroom window and have the cold, soap scented air rush over my face that I am not transported back to being a little girl and handing clothespins to my grandmother as she hung wet clothes on a line from a third floor window. I cannot wait in a buffet line without hearing my grandfather complain. A victim of the depression, he harbored painful memories of poverty and soup lines, and refused to eat in a restaurant later in life where he could not sit to be served. A buffet was out of the question. He would grumble extensively if made to hold his tray in a line, as he claimed, "like peasants." These beloved people are gone in body, but still with me daily in my heart.

Then there is Walter. A young boy when my mom was a child, he loved to ride the freight elevators at the factory where my mom and his other friends roller skated in the lot outside. Walter did not skate, so as he rode the archaic, clunking, doorless elevator, he would holler and wave from the open windows to his friends down below. One day, a careless Walter did not pull his head back into the elevator in time, and his friends watched in horror as Walter left this world.

In a time before grief therapy and post traumatic stress disorder, my mother and her friends handled their trauma in the only way people at the time knew how. They talked about it. Remembered it. And it became the stuff of legend. Being such young children, they had no interactions with Walter’s grieving parents. Left to their own coping skills, they would wonder endlessly as to Walter’s whereabouts on dark scary nights.

When they had children of their own, I and my cousins would shiver under our covers as my mother relayed the tale of Walter and the horrible fate he shared with Ichabod Crane. We would glance furtively in corners, and huddle closer together at sleepovers and gatherings on cold dark nights. Wondering if Walter was just beyond the shadows. Waiting. And watching.

Whenever in an elevator, my mother would tug my braids and tell me to behave and remind me of proper elevator behavior with one simple "Remember Walter!"

Then another generation later, I would find my own children along with their friends gathered at my mother’s feet begging to be told the story of Walter, clutching each other with saucer sized eyes. But they would leave each picnic and party with a new respect for no rough play while an elevator’s in motion, and waiting until the door has completely opened before extending a leg to step out.

I had not realized the extent of Walter’s long reach until one evening my family was leaving the buffet at the Horseshoe with my cousins from Tennessee and their two young daughters. As we all boarded the elevator and the doors began to hiss shut, his younger daughter, giggling and pushing with her sister and my daughter, teetered back and stumbled toward the closing doors.
Her older sister grabbed the younger girl, jerking her back into the center of the elevator and gave her a shake. "Mallory, don’t do that. Don’t you remember Walter?"

I smiled to myself. Thinking it may have brought Walter’s parents some tiny bit of consolation that their son had not vanished completely from this world. That returning to earth through the vastness of time, whispering over one shoulder was my grandfather grumbling over the fact that I had just stood in a buffet line "like a peasant." And two thousand miles away and over sixty years later was Walter, bringing another generation of children the importance of elevator safety for all.