The gymnastics coach is in his nineties now,
but he told me stories of his teaching career.
He told me of the sixteen-year-old male student
who snuck into the girls’ changing room
and molested a girl.
The coach took the boy and whipped him with his belt,
corporeal punishment that wouldn’t be allowed today,
not then either, but sometimes occurred.
Nevertheless, the boy’s family sued,
but they lost,
and the gymnastics coach kept his job.
That didn’t stop the family from regularly making
direct threats of violence against the coach.
Years later, the boy, a grown man in his mid-thirties,
contacted the coach and invited him to supper.
The coach initially refused.
He had, after all, been looking over his shoulder the last twenty years,
expecting an act of revenge from him or someone in his family.
After some persuasion, but not sure what to expect,
the coach finally agreed to meet the man in a public place.
The man simply wanted to thank the coach.
He said all of his siblings, brothers and sisters alike,
ended up in prison.
The boy, after his humiliations of the whipping
and his parents’ subsequent court claim,
decided to go to university and become a lawyer.
It wasn’t an easy road for him, but he persevered.
Had it not been for the coach, he said,
he would likely be in prison too.