Cracked

The first time I heard the word “cracked” I was walking home with a ninth-grader, Glenn Curry, who had just moved into the corner house before school started. He was a foreign exchange student from Mississippi. He was a tall, skinny red-haired guy still mad about the move. I was in seventh grade and we had been in school one month.

We were talking about one of the kids in my class who lived one street over named Larry. Larry was slow and I don’t mean in the 50-yard dash. Glenn was making fun of him, mimicking the way he talked. So was I. He talked like a younger version of Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade.”

“You know he’s cracked,” Glenn said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “He’s real cracked.” (I had no idea what it meant).

Later that night, in the heat of battle, I told my sister she was cracked. I got a whipping for it; and a lecture about the Insane Asylum in South Presa in San Antonio. So I figured out cracked means crazy.

That year Larry sat beside me in English class. We were reading “The Road Less Traveled.” The teacher asked where the road less traveled is. Nobody knew. When Larry raised his hand we rolled our eyes and knew he would “boldly go where no man has gone before.” I can’t remember his words verbatim, but the essence of his vision of the road has stayed with me.

“The road,” he said, and it took him a while to say it, “the road is where no one is taller or shorter, faster or slower, where nobody has to catch up, nobody’s stupid and nobody’s alone.”

We should be so cracked.

Leonard Cohen wrote and sang, “There are cracks, cracks in everything; that’s how the light gets in, that’s how the light gets in.”

Sometimes, that’s how the light gets out.