A C H A P E L TA L K
by Jack Gallagher McLaughlin ’17 October 25, 2016
Having a Place
T
he road next to my childhood house in the suburbs of Boston is where, at the age of five, I was run clean over by my mother’s car. The day the incident occurred, I had discovered a cardboard box in our driveway, put out for recycling. Naturally, I climbed inside and made it my fort. I lay on my stomach, my feet dangling out and kicking against the pavement. As my mom pulled into the driveway, she apparently didn’t see my legs, and thought she could just “nudge” the box out of the way. If there’s one thing I’ll never forget, it’s the searing mental image of a giant car tire squishing my shins into the pavement—and of course, I’ll never forget the accompanying pain. I screamed louder than I ever had, and my mom, realizing what she had done, abruptly put the car in reverse and ran back over my left leg. Ouch. After tears, an ambulance ride, and various medical tests, the doctors told us that, miraculously, my legs would only suffer some bruising and a lot of swelling. They put me in immobilizing air casts that set my legs in perfectly straight lines, and told me not to walk at all. So, in order to get around the house, I used my arms to drag myself across the floor. I actually thought this method of transport was kind of cool; I remember sliding down carpeted steps and propelling myself along the hardwood floors of the halls. After two weeks, I went back to the doctor to get the casts removed, and took my first steps since the accident. My mom (predictably) cried as if I were a healed Tiny Tim. I really didn’t mind the whole thing too much. My mom bought me all my favorite junk food and didn’t yell at me, for anything, for a good month. Over the weeks following the accident, our Volvo station wagon was jokingly renamed “the car mom used to run over Jack.” And even today, my family thinks the nickname “Jack-in-the-box” is hilarious.
32
Groton School Quarterly
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Spring 2017
The road next to my house in Washington, D.C., is where, when I was eight, my father would force me and my siblings to go for a run with him every morning before school. I remember kneeling in the driveway at 6:30 a.m., lacing up my Asics sneakers, and desperately wishing I were back in bed. My dad, recalling his experience in Air-Force ROTC boot camp, instructed us to run in tight, single-track formation and call out obstructions in the road so that others wouldn’t trip. “Root!” my oldest sister Maria would shout. The word flowed down the line, my other sister Catherine saying it, then me, then Bernadette, then Charlie. Lucy and Caroline, the babies of the family at the time, got to stay at home with mom. And mom was pregnant with Paul, the eighth child, who later became the only one of our siblings to be born in D.C. On those mornings, we ran through corridors underneath highways, and I listened to the scream of the cars overhead, which reminded me that I was not, in fact, the only person awake at this ungodly hour. Everything in the city moved on a tight schedule, and, in a way, I always liked that we too followed a schedule. My dad said the running would establish order and discipline in our lives, and I think it worked. I still go running almost every day. The road leading up to my house in Anchorage, Alaska, is where, at the age of ten, I sledded in an orange plastic toboggan on wintry Saturday afternoons. After the move from D.C., my family’s tightly packed schedule seemed to disintegrate as we adapted to the laid-back attitude of Alaska, but everything still moved fast. In the years after the move, we welcomed two more babies to the family, Michael and Gianna, which brought our count to a perfect ten. Our house sat 2,000 feet above sea level in the Chugach mountain range on the outskirts of Anchorage, and our “neighborhood,” if you could even call it that, was