Dismissals

The man looked lost in the post office lobby. I asked him what he wanted. Stamps? Mail a letter? He looked about and said softly, “I best go now.” He turned toward the steps. I walked beside him. A van, a woman in the driver’s seat, waited. I helped him with his seatbelt. She asked him, “Did you get Christmas stamps?” The man may have shrugged, I’m not sure. Good fortune was with us. I had a few of the new Christmas stamps. “Here,” I said, “Don’t forget these.” The man may have smiled, I’m not sure, but I did.

He sat on a chair in her kitchen and railed against the world, against the bad luck, betrayals, abandonment by friends and family, against miseries and ruin heaped upon him. She nodded, sliced bread, cut meat, stirred soup and rinsed a ripe tomato in the sink. The man sat in the quiet for a long while, anger trickling away, hungry now. She took down a bowl and a plate. She ladled soup and upon the plate she placed bread, meat, sliced tomato and a dab of … was it mustard? You never know what you will get when God prepares lunch.

Pete told me, “If you intend to do something that hasn’t been done before, be ready for the people around you to say it cannot be done.” Thomas Edison: “I think I’ll invent a telephone ….” Jonas Salk: “Maybe a vaccine will work ….” Herman Melville: “I will write a book about a white whale ….” Naysayers notwithstanding, they did what they set out to do. So can we. We can build up the church, feed the hungry, house the homeless, be peacemakers in a troubled land. Folks will say “It cannot be done,” but then, we are not working alone, are we?

The words are carved on a seven hundred year old wooden door in the lower galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Mal Vit Qui Ne Mande.” Linguists speculate what these early French words mean. Best guess: “One lives badly who does not ask.” As for me … I did not ask her to the dance … I did not ask my dad about the war … or my mother about the ring she gave away … I did not ask my sister about the cancer that took her life. Too late to ask those questions … but not too late to ask other questions.

Workers in an office, bent over their desks, waiting for five o’clock. Kay the custodian came by every afternoon, stood in the doorway and asked cheerily, “How’s your basket?” By this Kay meant, ‘Is your wastebasket full? Should I empty it?’ No one ever answered her. Kay came in and picked up the wadded paper, bottle caps, cigarette butts and whatnot that had been hurled at the wastebasket and missed. Her work done, and no conversation to be had, Kay left. The years went on. Kay died and left two daughters. Who knew? An Army Lieutenant and a university professor.

During the service of Yom Kippur, I heard a story of the Second Jewish Temple. Destroyed in 70 Common Era, the Jewish community needed a substitute for the offering of sacrifices at the Temple. Two rabbis walked past the ruins of the Temple. Said one, “What will we do now without the place that atoned for the sins of Israel?” His companion replied, “We can still atone, just as we did through sacrifices, but now we will do so with deeds of loving kindness, for every act of kindness is a prayer, a prayer that walks, moves, breathes and lives.”

Every morning he bought the paper at the newsstand and ambled up the street. Every morning, a few doors along, the old man stood, leaning on his broom or snow shovel. They greeted one another and asked of each other’s family, “Your boys doing well?” “Oh, sure, thanks. Your girl? Feeling better?” Then they parted. Every morning the old man kept watch for his friend and stepped out to meet him. The man with the newspaper adjusted his gait, watchful, waiting for the old man to appear, a bond between them built in those few minutes and even fewer words.

There are newborn babies in the hospital nursery who cry out but there is no mother there to hear them, no mother to take them up and hold them. Abandoned or born addicted or simply forgotten, these babies are alone. The nurses do what they can but it is the volunteers who come to hold the babies, to speak softly, to sit in the rocking chair and hum to the babies the lullabies that someone once hummed to us. It is certainly a help to the nurses. It is a godsend to the babies. And for us? Reward beyond measure.

She said, “I don’t feel like a good Christian. I don’t have time to pray. Sometimes I whisper words when things aren’t going well. All I can say is, ’Help me, Lord!’ And feeding homeless folks like the church does on Saturdays? Lord, I can barely get the baloney between the bread for my own little ones. I do wish the homeless folks well, and the folks that fix their food. I do. I don’t know a blessed thing about scripture but I do believe that God is Love. It says that in the Bible, doesn’t it?” It does. Amen.

Some days there is a one-armed man with a bicycle in the drugstore parking lot. When he sees me, he walks over, pushing his bike. I’ve never seen him ride it. We talk for few minutes about sports, the weather and whatnot. One day I gave him a dollar and a man in a van saw me, slowed almost to a stop where we stood and said, for all to hear, “Tell him to get a job!” He sped off. The man with the bicycle was a mason’s assistant. Maybe the man in the van knows where there’s work.