Children can be cruel to each other, and examples at the Wolf Middle School were not hard to find.
Ralph was an easy target of bullying. Being raised by a single mom with two younger sisters, Ralph frequently went without to make sure his sisters were taken care of.
That was especially apparent when it was time to buy school clothes. Ralph insisted his clothing was fine and the majority of their family’s limited budget be spent on his sisters. In seventh grade, children start caring about fashion, and Ralph’s worn-out tennis shoes were an occasional source of ridicule from the children raised in more affluent families.
Ralph’s shoes bore the brunt of his active outdoor activities, which included fishing and hiking. The soles of Ralph’s shoes were worn thin, but they remained free of holes.
The toes were scuffed and soiled, but it was the shoelaces that alerted the casual viewer to the dilapidated state of his foot attire. Ralph tied knots in the broken shoelace on his right shoe, but the shoelace on his left shoe was entirely beyond repair and had been completely replaced by a length of blue, nylon twine which stood in sharp contrast to the shoe’s original red color, now streaked with mud.
When teased about his makeshift shoelace, Ralph would pretend to be setting a new fashion trend, mismatching his shoelaces as other kids intentionally mismatched their socks. Unfortunately, Ralph didn’t have the charisma to pull off that fiction and his classmates teased him all the more.
Kabir was on the opposite spectrum of the clothing situation. Kabir wore button-down dress shirts and khaki pants with sparkly, purple athletic shoes. His parents owned one of the upscale motels in town and they doted on their only child as the parents of Indian immigrants are prone to do. Kabir wasn’t teased for looking poor. Rather, he was teased for dressing too fine.
Middle school children sometimes develop a pack mentality so that children who stand out in one way or the other become the objects of ridicule and disdain. Uniformity is valued more than individuality.
And, the bullies who drove the seventh-grade train of public opinion were always on the lookout for peers with low self-esteem who didn’t fight back when contempt was poured upon their fashion choices.
So, while Ralph was ridiculed for his worn-out sneakers, Kabir was teased for wearing expensive ones. Life isn’t fair, and the gentle children are the ones who unfairly bear the burden of this injustice.
While the teachers at Wolf Middle School did make an effort to teach tolerance and kindness, they were overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of teaching in a world that increasingly didn’t value education, so they didn’t prioritize intervening in the bullying Ralph and Kabir faced on a daily basis.
Kabir and Ralph weren’t friends. There were too many cultural and economic differences between their families. While Ralph enjoyed playing outside, because his mom couldn’t afford to buy him a smartphone, Kabir preferred the safety of staying indoors with video games and social media.
While opposite poles of a magnet attract each other, Kabir and Ralph were opposite and repelled one another. That’s a tragedy because there was much these two boys could learn from each other.
As the school winter break approached, the bullies became more rambunctious and bold with their pranks and Kabir fell into the crosshairs of their devious shenanigans. Normally, Kabir was an excellent student, but the history lecture on the causes of the War of 1812 was too much even for such a good student.
Kabir dozed off while sitting in the next to the last row in the classroom, providing an opportunity for the class bullies to tie Kabir’s shoelaces to his chair. When the bell rang signaling the end of the period, Kabir jumped up, tripped, and fell flat on his face, bloodying his nose. The bullies laughed and left him there in a crumpled mess.
Normally, Ralph would have quietly snuck out of the classroom, but pity for Kabir’s situation struck him precisely because the source of Kabir’s calamity was his shoelaces. Kabir struggled but was unable to get himself untangled from the chair. He sobbed and wiped his bloody nose with the sleeve of his beautiful button-down shirt.
As the other children snickered on their way out the door, Ralph made his way to the back of the room. The shoelaces were knotted too well to easily untie, and Ralph unilaterally made the decision to cut the still struggling Kabir free of his bonds.
While Ralph would have preferred to use a pocketknife to cut Kabir free, weapons of all kinds were prohibited in school, so Ralph quietly clipped away at Kabir’s shoelaces with a pair of fingernail clippers, quickly freeing him. But the shoelaces were destroyed.
Being a boy who enjoyed the outdoors, Ralph pulled out a piece of blue twine from his pocket, as boys who enjoy the outdoors are prone to have on their person at any given time, and clipped the twine in half. He laced-up both of Kabir’s shoes to match. Ralph smiled at the result.
The blue twine looked remarkably well on those high-priced athletic sneakers. No words were exchanged between the two boys as they picked themselves off the floor and hurried to their next class.
As providence dictated, the next day Wolf Middle School had a mandatory gift exchange on the day before the winter break. A ten-dollar price limit was set for all gifts.
The children excitedly chatted in homeroom as the gift exchange was about to begin. Self-conscious of the homemade fishing lure he had whittled from a tree branch to give as his gift, Ralph nervously looked around and was surprised to see that Kabir had not bought new shoelaces to replace the blue twine Ralph had quickly crafted into shoelaces from the day before.
He knew Kabir’s family had money and that dressing properly was something Kabir valued. He was mystified that Kabir still wore the makeshift shoelaces.
Ralph’s turn came to open his gift. Even before he liberated the set of new black shoelaces from its poorly wrapped package, the other children started mocking him. Embarrassed again, Ralph knew the bullies would win if he put them on. Bravely, he took the new shoelaces over to Kabir whom he knew would put them to good use.
Kabir smiled at Ralph’s kind gesture, but pushed the shoelaces aside. He pulled from his own pocket two lengths of blue twine and gave them to Ralph. Tears formed in Ralph’s eyes. He felt joy and acceptance for the first time in a long time. Ralph knelt and replaced his worn, knotted shoelaces with the blue twine Kabir had given him. Now, their shoelaces matched!
The bullies were stunned and left speechless. Ralph and Kabir embraced, and Kabir invited Ralph to come over to his house after school to play X-Box. The gift exchange at Wolf Middle School continued, but the best gift of all that day was the gift of friendship exchanged between two boys who wore matching blue twine for their shoelaces.
Amen and Amen.
Rev. Dr. Steven J. Voris delivered this sermon on Christmas Eve 2024 at the First Presbyterian Church, Luverne.
