Robin or Russell?
A Personal Essay from Robin Walz
On Memorial Day 1965, my mother loaded me into the family car, a two-tone yellow and green Chevrolet Bel Air sedan. I was used to impromptu excursions with her, setting off with no sense of where we were going or how long it might take to get there. Eventually, we arrived at the southwest gravel entrance to the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Olympia. My mother parked the car, opened the driver’s door, went around to the back, picked up a Mason jar filled with cut flowers from our home garden, and grabbed a pair of heavy-duty scissors. I slid out the passenger side. Together we walked across the lawn and between headstones to Babyland.
At some point, my mother stopped, set down the flowers, sat on the grass, tucked her legs under her skirt, gripped the scissors, and began to trim grass from around a grave marker. Nearing the end of second grade, I could read for myself:
Russell Ray Walz
Apr 24, 1957
May 3, 1957
A silhouette of a lamb was carved into the lower-right corner of the headstone. I asked my mother who that was. My twin brother, she said, who died when he was just a baby. Finished with trimming the grass away, my mother twisted a metal handle located above the gravestone, pulled up a metal cylinder, flipped it over to make a rudimentary vase, arranged the flowers and poured water in. She gathered the scissors and jar, stood up, smoothed her skirt, and we walked back to the car. On the drive home, whether we spoke or not, the emotional effect was silence. Over the years, occasionally my mother would recount stories about my twin and me.
Esther Walz birthed me at St. Peter’s Hospital, assisted by Dr. Maxwell Hunter, on Wednesday, April 24, 1957, at ten past eight in the evening. I weighed 5 pounds, 6½ ounces, and measured 17½ inches. Immediately following my birth, Dr. Hunter said something to Esther along the lines of, “Keep going, mother, you have another one in there!” Once during a pregnancy visit, the doctor listened to her abdomen through his stethoscope and wondered aloud, “Is that a second heartbeat I hear?” It turned out Esther was carrying fraternal twins, but she did not realize it until giving birth. I was the smaller of the two, but positioned to come out first. After my delivery, the larger baby did not immediately follow. Her labor continued for the better part of another hour, until a second baby was finally born at 8:59 p.m. Whenever telling this part of the story, my mother was emphatic, “I never blamed Dr. Hunter. He did everything he could to get that baby out of there.”
We were Baby Boy A and Baby Boy B. My parents had already agreed upon Robin for a boy’s name. Now they needed two. My father took a J.C. Penney’s sales slip from his wallet and tore it in two. My mother wrote Robin Roy (my mother’s father and one of her brothers were named Leroy) on the back of one half, and Russell Ray (my mother’s eldest brother was Russell, and her cousin Jeanette’s husband was Ray) on the other. My father randomly chose: Baby A became Robin and Baby B, Russell. In the “Newcomers” column of births at St. Peter’s Hospital, The Daily Olympian announced, “Mr. and Mrs. William Walz, Route Three, Box 260, twin boys, Robin Roy and Russell Ray, April 24.”
Russell endured tremendous physical trauma during his delivery. He was placed in an incubator, but the distress was severe. He was not going to survive. “His brain was too badly damaged,” my mother would say. The on-call pastor at the hospital, Reverend J. Edgar Pearson, Jr. of United Churches of Olympia, baptized Russell on April 28. Five days later, The Daily Olympian reported, “One of the twin sons born to Mr. and Mrs. William Walz died Thursday afternoon in an Olympia hospital at the age of eight days. A private graveside funeral service will be held in the Odd Fellows Cemetery Monday morning.” At 10:30 a.m. on May 6, Reverend Malcolm Alexander of Westminster Presbyterian Church conducted Russell’s graveside service in the Babyland section of the cemetery. My Uncle Leroy and Aunt Mary attended. Floral bouquets arrived from Bruce and Doris Briggs at Briggs Nursery (where my father worked), the congregation of Westminster United Presbyterian Church (where my mother was a member), and neighbors Bill and Marilyn Seibold.
After the birth announcement, my parents received several “Twins! How Wonderful!” cards and letters. These were soon outpaced by sympathy cards, overlapping no doubt with well wishes from faraway family in North Dakota. One sympathy card was signed by sixteen mothers and grandmothers who lived within a mile of our home on Lemon Road. A new round of “Congratulations to Mother, Dad and Baby” cards arrived, with happy messages about the singular new addition to the family, and continued intermittently from Mother’s Day through baby’s first Christmas.
Of course, I knew nothing of this during the car ride home after trimming the grass around Russell’s gravestone. My eight-year-old brain struggled to absorb what I had witnessed. Who was Russell? Would I ever know him? How do I know that I’m Robin, and he’s Russell? What if I’m really Russell, and Robin is the one who died? I harbored and pondered those questions, obsessively. The earliest answers came from our neighbors across the cow pasture.
Elsie and Roy Sellards were outliers in our local community of small-acreage family farms in South Bay, northeast of Olympia. Like other families, the Sellards had a milk cow, chickens, an extensive vegetable garden, fruit trees and berry patches. As Seventh-day Adventists, they were vegetarians (I remember eating mayonnaise and jelly sandwiches at their house), whole foods proselytizers (owning and operating an on-site bakery), and teetotalers (spurning stimulants and intoxicants), atypical in the fifties and sixties, even in our semi-rural neighborhood. They largely kept to themselves. Still, our families were on friendly terms. Roy and my father milked each other’s cows when needed, and my brothers and I played with the Sellards kids. They were religious separatists, sending four sons and a daughter to the local Seventh-day Adventist elementary school, and later bussing them to Puyallup to attend parochial high school. It was the Sellards who first provided me with answers to questions about my dead twin brother.
I’m not sure when the Sellards gave us Around the World Stories by Dorothy White-Christian and Ruth Wheeler, issued in the “True Education Reader Series” by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. The opening chapters were like other beginner books I had been reading in school; stories about grandfather and grandmother taking the grandchildren on a trip to the zoo, mother teaching the children about star constellations and extolling the magnifying powers of the telescope, schoolteacher Mrs. Downs identifying types of trees, and children’s problem stories with moral lessons. Chapters on religious instruction were sandwiched between; how God created the world, the Battle of Jericho, and other simplified Bible stories. Later chapters emphasized the importance of missions to provide practical assistance to heathens and to gain converts; the benefits of the missionary potato, and doctors who worked in the jungles and missionary villages of Southeast Asia, South Africa, China, and on the Navaho reservation.
I was fascinated by the penultimate chapter, “When Jesus Comes Again.” One day, it began, a small cloud will appear in the sky, growing ever larger and brighter until it outshines the sun. God’s people will be happy, but bad people will hide under rocks. A full-page illustration accompanied the story. A multitude of angels bore Jesus, with groomed beard and long hair, upon a throne of clouds. Regally robed, he held a scepter and rays of light emanated from his magnificent crown.
I fixated on the pages that followed, which told how, on the day Jesus returns, the dead will wake up, rise from their graves, reunite with their families, and angels will carry them to heaven. I felt exuberant, confident that on that day my mother, father, and I would go to Babyland at the Odd Fellows Cemetery, kneel down beside Russell’s grave, and greet him as he emerged from the earth, the same age as me (because he’s my twin, right?). Then we would all go to heaven’s new earth to live forever and forever.
My eight-year-old mind did not consider the consequences of telling this to my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Burleson. A no-nonsense schoolmarm, she wrote a note, slid it into an envelope, and told me to take it home. When my mother read it, even as a child I could see she was distressed. She called the school secretary and made an appointment with my teacher. In that conference, Mrs. Burleson told her my superstitious beliefs and morbid fantasies indicated deep-seated psychological problems. She recommended I see a child psychiatrist.
By this point, my mother was beside herself with worry. When my father came home from work that evening, she recounted the conversation with Mrs. Burleson. He listened patiently, and then said, “Forget it. He’s just a kid. Kids think all kinds of things. He’ll grow out of it.”
I did grow out of it. Over the course of the next year I resolved the “Robin or Russell?” dilemma. In third grade, Russell Pylkki became my best friend, and remained so through high school. It seemed weird to me that best friends would have the same name.
It was simpler to accept that he’s Russell, and I’m Robin.
I also came to realize that if people had been calling me Russell all along, and that’s how I thought of myself, I would have turned out differently. No one would ever ask Russ why his parents gave him a girl’s name. I was, and always had been, Robin. I grew increasingly comfortable in my skin. The puny kid who started first grade wearing 4T pants. Whose father caught a King salmon that weighed more than he did. The Boy Wonder to Russell’s Batman on the playground. The boy who, in the third-grade talent show, stood alone on the stage and, accompanied by his mother on the piano, belted out “Margie” in full voice before a full audience in the elementary school gymnasium.
Footnote
“Margie,” music by Con Conrad and J. Russell Robinson, lyrics by Benny Davis, 1920.
Bio/Note from the Author: I was born and raised on a small family farm in Olympia, Washington, my father a nurseryman and mother an elementary school cook. For most of my adult life, I have taught history, first at a private secondary school and later at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. As a cultural historian, I explored the intersection of surrealism and popular culture, most notably in Pulp Surrealism (University of California Press, 2000) and the English translation “Death of Nick Carter” by Philippe Soupault (McSweeny’s 24, 2007). In retirement, my writing has turned to personal essays.