Dudley Ball

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.