“Dudley Ball,” by John Brehm, reminded me of my own teased and taunted classmates. Might I have befriended Fat Bob, a rosy-cheeked animal lover who could trumpet like an elephant? Could I have been kinder to Metal-Crutch Chuck, spastic legged and stitch scarred? I remember how, upon request, he would sing the entire song “American Pie.” I could have, should have. But I was jello-brick dumb. Wisdom, what little I now have, has come to me glacially slow.
David Hill
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
John Brehm’s devastating poem “Dudley Ball” [August 2022] brought back my elementary-school years. We had a puffy-cheeked kid who was relentlessly taunted and called “Chipmunk Cheeks.” Unlike Dudley Ball, though, this kid had at least one student who spoke with him: me. I sensed in him a kindness and a vulnerability. Nearly sixty years later I still have his short obituary. He was only seven or eight years old when he died.
Zoë Bossiere’s essay [“The Beetle King,” August 2022], however, reminded me that I was not always that “gentler kind of boy” she describes. I recall torturing a defenseless banana slug by pouring salt on it. Like Bossiere, I feel a familiar guilt bubble up in me as I look back on that horrific act.
I am grateful to The Sun for highlighting, as Brehm puts it, the “fears and flaws” of our lives, in a single issue of the magazine.
Bert Pankler
Greenbrae, California