so I’d throw my pencil. A letter came home from the gym teacher saying how I was failing: I had flat feet and “severe hand-eye coordination issues,” which was a fancy way of saying that I couldn’t catch a baseball. I remember one rainy day during a recess period inside: I busied myself by knocking down each and every chair in our classroom. I got sent to the office for that.
Zach would get on my nerves—and I told him so.
I didn’t like his haircut—it was too much like mine. I didn’t like his shirts, they were colorful and had fancy zippers—mine were usually a shade of blue or brown and I buttoned them right up to the top of my neck. I’d compare myself to Zach and say to him: “You look like a girl.”
There was a tower in the middle of the school playground and we third-graders would race each other to the top. I wanted to make sure that Zach would never beat me, so I’d kick him, wrench his hand off the ladder, or try to push him off if he got ahead of me.
Then there were other things that I said and did to Zach. But I can’t remember them.
But I do remember Zach’s response, one time, when I was pressing my attack.
“I hate you, Mat.”
I do remember that.
I’ll always remember that.
“Hey, Mat Schmalz, get over here!” Zach repeated.
I finally turned round. There was Zach—standing there, nearly level with the fringe of the bar’s beach umbrella.
His hair was close-cropped too—though there was a little more on the top of his head than mine.
No choice, I walked across the patio, looking down, measuring every step.
Zach’s eyes were bright, big smile on his face. He switched his drink from right hand to left, stretched out his arm—for a second, I worried that he was going to grab the nape of my neck.
Instead, he gently clasped my shoulder.
He said, “I am so sorry.”
I stood there, speechless.
“I am so sorry that I hit you in the fourth grade.”
“I deserved it,” I said—which was how I honestly felt even though I had absolutely no idea what Zach was talking about.
There were a couple of other onlookers standing around the bar, and so Zach explained. “Mat and I were doing a play in fourth grade.”
Evidently, we got into some sort of argument and Zach hit me.
“It was a chicken scratch kind of thing,” Zach said and held up his fingers, tensed and extended like a rooster’s foot.
I’d like to say that Zach’s description jogged my memory, but it didn’t. I can imagine what happened, though. It must have been when I was engaging in some sort of verbal violence against Zach: teasing him, ridiculing him, shaming him—all the while probing for more weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
And I finally pushed Zach over the line. I’m sure I wanted to get a rise out of him in some way and just got more than I bargained for.
But Zach was the one who felt guilty. He clasped my shoulder a little more tightly and said to me: “I’ve been waiting thirty years to tell you I was sorry.”
Sins are funny things—they have a long half-life. They hide, they wait, but they inevitably reemerge to get their own satisfaction—or our own comeuppance
Sin, of course, was a consistent feature of my Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes—less formally known as Catholic Sunday school, though it was usually held on Monday evenings. As the Baltimore Catechism puts it, “Actual sin is any willful thought, word, deed, or omission contrary to the will of God.”2 Although I couldn’t have quoted catechetical literature verbatim in third grade, I did see that what I was doing was sinful.
I knew what I was doing—even though I was a child.
But I did not fully understand what I was doing either. Even now I don’t know, exactly, why I bullied Zach. But what I can say is that Zach and I had that odd combination of similarities and differences that made connection and conflict possible. If I felt angry, unloved, frustrated, I found that I could make Zach share in those feelings.
At the reunion, Zach could have confronted me and told me how the wounds I inflicted on him healed, or did not heal, with time. He could have stuck to the dutiful small talk and perfunctory questions that so often characterize reunions and related functions like weddings and funerals. Zach could have ignored me altogether, very much like I might have ignored him if he had not pointed me out and called me by name.
But Zach chose to show me mercy.
The reunion continued with the whole class gathering round in a circle—it was time for awards: furthest distanced traveled, most times married, life of the party.
I stood shoulder to shoulder with Zach—we didn’t win anything this time either.
What Zach did was merciful because he canceled a debt that I owed him. But he also did something more: he focused on our relationship—not just as we experienced it back in third and fourth grade, but also as we were experiencing it then and there. The mercy was a prelude to reconciliation, reestablishing a bond that was broken decades ago.
As the evening wound up and then wound down, I found myself circling back to Zach many times. We talked about work, about our families, and we mourned recently deceased classmates from our elementary-school days. Throughout our talks, Zach never mentioned once that I had bullied him.
Part of reconciliation is letting go—and I suppose Zach thought it was bad form to hold onto something negative about me from a time when we were kids. But there is something about the way we behave as children that prefigures the way we behave as adults. Our childhood cruelties often fester and metastasize into wounds or cancers that never fully heal. That’s one reason I felt so guilty and ashamed about my treatment of Zach—it pointed to the person I could become with a drink in my hand.
So, I have to confess that I was glad that Zach didn’t call me out for being a bully. I felt relief, and freedom. And I sat back and rested in that experience, letting it wash over me.
“Mat, it’s Zach.”
Zach had taken the initiative to call me. A couple of weeks earlier, I sent him an e-mail and apologized outright for bullying him in third grade.
It had been eight years since the reunion.
Mercy—like sin—is a funny thing. It also has a long half-life.
I’m not against apologies—I offer them quite liberally, actually. But I didn’t apologize
