Comma Man Can

by Niles Reddick

When he was young, his mother told him he was what he ate, and the combination of Little Debbie's along with the Funyuns he inhaled in his university dorm room gave him a midsection innertube that wouldn’t be a lifesaver when swimming in the lake.

I had told my class over and over, like a stuck record, they were what they wrote, and I saw him as a giant walking comma slinking the halls of the university because of the overuse and abuse in his papers. I prayed he found a coordinating conjunction coed.

His mop hair covered his eyes, and each time he spoke with me, he used the word “like” every three words. Like his inability to communicate, I figured he'd been passed from one grade to the next in his high school and graduated with an inability to write a sentence. He seemed a gentle giant, someone who could play the line on the football team while his struggling family borrowed to pay tuition, dorm costs, and a meal plan combined with added out of state fees. I knew he wouldn't make it in the university, would have a tough life beginning adulthood with debt, and would struggle with generational poverty.

I wrote him a note on his reflective essay (in addition to his nine comma splices, he had seven sentence fragments). I abbreviated those as “frag” in cursive, he had no idea what I meant, he couldn't read (or write) cursive, and thought I was commenting his writing was like a “fag’s.” I laughed and explained it using an analogy of an incomplete play in football to get the point across. Though I couldn’t see his eyes to verify, he smiled and nodded he’d gotten it. I hoped for better next time and hoped he'd get help from me during my office hours, go to the writing center or the student success center (both at no direct costs to him), the football tutor, the guy mowing the grass by his dorm, or the grandma spooning out eggs on his breakfast plate in the dining hall, but he wouldn't.

He broke or chipped vertebrae in his back during a football game around midterm, was hauled off the field on a stretcher, and was eventually withdrawn from classes. Though he wasn’t passing, I saw no need to assign a “withdraw failing” given his condition he suffered for the university’s football team, and by the next semester, I honestly forgot about him and moved on to the next crop of writing-challenged students.

Years later, I was in the city for holiday shopping with my wife and adult children, and heard someone yell my name and wave. It was that same former student with a nice haircut dressed in a parking officer uniform, checking meters and marking tires. He was humped, his back curved like a comma, likely from his chipped and broken vertebrae injury in that football game, and he said I’d inspired him to go back to the community college and finish once he’d recovered from his multiple surgeries. He was grateful and firmly shook my hand up and down like a seesaw and never used the word “like”. I was happy to hear he felt I had been an influence and motivation, but really, he’d done it on his own.