This essay, seen here in its entirety, was previously published in The Dead Mule, an online literary journal that specializes in writings about the south.  No cartoon animals were harmed in the writing of this essay.

There is a blue plastic bag living in the back of my closet. It’s a fairly plain, nondescript blue plastic bag. Outside of the attractive drawstring closure, it bares a striking resemblance to any common Wal-Mart bag. I don’t see it much and I think about it even less, but it’s been there for years and so far has outlived countless cleaning expeditions, three closets and one old moving box labeled miscellaneous. You would never guess that underneath the old sweaters and buried amongst the miscellaneous is an aging piece of plastic that knows all the secrets of socio-economic status and basic human decency.

The bag was given to me on my last day of fifth grade at Irondale Jr. High. While I was there, the school was celebrating having proudly served the residents of Irondale, Alabama (grades K-8) for the past one hundred years. The school and the community were closely linked. Most of the students lived within walking distance. I remember there being only two buses for over three hundred students. It’s still hard to distinguish the school’s surroundings from the people I knew there. They stand indivisible in my memory.

The community around the school was a stereotypical poor southern town. The people there lived in little, white houses with the paint peeling off, a few patches of grass were scattered through the front yards. Some houses had cinderblocks leading up to the front door, doubling as the front steps. I was quickly accepted into this community even though we were considered practically Yankees because we were from North Carolina and living in a hotel the whole time we were there. Somehow I felt very close to that place and the people I went to school with. There is a certain bond that exists between people who share a library card, regardless of how much paint is on their house or whether they bathe with tiny hotel soap.

My brother formed a similar bond with his new surroundings as well. Eric is four years older than I am and went to school in a neighboring town. It was a considerably wealthier area than my beloved Irondale and he spared no effort reminding me. We fought and wrestled almost daily over his endless taunts about my friends. The mere hint that he was about to climb his perch to look down on me and the people I went to school with was enough to send me flying across the room to knock him back down with the rest of us.

This is the way things were for most of the time we lived there. I continued on my course and Eric continued on his. Christmas brought an armistice, as did repeated warnings from our parents. The days settled into a routine and began to run one day into the next. Suddenly, the company my father worked for declared bankruptcy and after months of searching the only job to be found was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We were moving again.

My last day at school was similar to all the others. I went to gym class and played football (a local religion) as I always had and even suffered through the dreaded Mrs. Zarovski’s history class one last time. The only thing that broke from the routine was the fact that I would never be returning. As the day came close to ending, Ms. Walker sent my friend Terrell and me on an errand to deliver a note to another teacher. We went quickly about our way and finished our chore, but we stopped by the playground for a while before returning to class and even walked around the school once before going back inside. By this point it was clear that we were wasting time for a reason. They were giving me a surprise party and it was up to Terrell to keep me busy while they got ready.

When we got back, I stopped at my locker in the hall and Terrell went around the corner and into the room. When he went in I heard a loudly squealed "surprise" followed by an even louder groan of recognition. I waited a minute and went in to find the room empty. Ms. Walker said that they had all gone to the library and I should just wait. That’s when they flooded out of the cloakroom and shouted surprise one more time before the food was brought out. We had cake, cookies and the obligatory Kool-Aid, but the most unexpected and touching part of the day was that they all gave me going away presents. Even Melissa, the girl who never said a word, gave me a little plastic motorcycle. I’m sure that for Eric’s friends it would have been considered cheap, but an unexpected gift from someone who climbs a cinderblock to enter their house is a treasure. At the end, all of the gifts; the motorcycle, the eagle necklace that hung from a brown shoestring, and even the ancient headphones that were heavy enough to rip the ears off my head were placed in a plain, nondescript, blue plastic bag with a drawstring closure. When we moved, I placed these sacred objects in a box labeled miscellaneous that has followed me around for the past eleven years.

It was not until my junior year of high school that it dawned on me what that day and those months meant. We were reading The Grapes of Wrath and had come to Tom Joad’s famous speech about being wherever there were people who deserved better than their station in life. Throughout the novel, I had the nagging feeling that I should be recognizing something. The people described all sounded familiar. It wasn’t until reading that speech that I realized I did know the people he was talking about. For a year, I had gone to school with them and played with them. I even played Rudolph in their Christmas pageant.

I recently departed with the eagle medallion attached to the brown shoestring. One of my dear friends had convinced himself that the world was no longer the kind of place he wished to raise children in. He believed that money and status had killed humanity and decency. I gave him the necklace and told him how I had received it. I’ve never seen Dan so moved as when I told him the story of the blue plastic bag.

Sadly, the school was demolished the same year I left and a new school was built in its place. I have a hard time imagining what the new school could possibly look like. I wonder if it’s modern or traditional. I wonder if they used any of the original bricks. I wonder if it is still a symbol of the people I knew there. I can’t begin to answer these questions, nor would I want to for fear of changing the memory. All I can do is hope that somewhere on that new, modern building there is a patch of white paint peeling away.